


A Chance to Live

by littlechinesedoll



Series: Yours to Destroy [1]
Category: Injustice: Gods Among Us
Genre: Alpha Clark Kent, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, Captivity, Cheating, Dark, Depression, Detention, Dubious Consent, F/M, Forced Bonding, Forced Pregnancy, Imprisonment, Infidelity, Intersex Omegas, Knotting, M/M, Manipulation, Mating Bites, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mpreg, Murder, Omega Bruce Wayne, Rape, Stockholm Syndrome, Toxic Relationship, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-27
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-31 09:46:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 16
Words: 28,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8573551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlechinesedoll/pseuds/littlechinesedoll
Summary: anon asked: what if after regime!superman and insurgency!batman had sex. Bruce ends up pregnant (if it's also a universe w/ a/b/o in it) i feel like that adds salt to my wounds bc that was painful.
An A/B/O AU of this prompt about Regime!Superman and Insurgency!Batman.
---
“Your last heat ended ten weeks ago,” Clark looks at Bruce, who still looks like Clark is about to attack. “And today, you went out to buy food, and collapsed at a supermarket,”
Bruce stares at him.
“Are you aware that you’re approximately nine weeks pregnant?”
Bruce pales. “No,”





	1. Destruction

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Destruction](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8395144) by [littlechinesedoll](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlechinesedoll/pseuds/littlechinesedoll). 



> You don't have to read "Destruction" but it's recommended that you do. 
> 
> Tumblr link this chapter's post: http://cumdumpsterbrucie.tumblr.com/post/153264081166/what-if-after-regimesuperman-and
> 
> tumblr link to this several chapter story: http://cumdumpsterbrucie.tumblr.com/tagged/a-chance-to-live/chrono

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is the prequel story to A Chance to Live called Destruction originally posted here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/8395144. 
> 
> This wasn't originally posted together with ACtL. I chose to put this as a chapter here so that people who don't read notes and aren't able to read this can read this. This is originally not an A/B/O fic, but it's what ACtL was based off of.

Bruce knows Clark is listening, but he goes out anyway. It’s the anniversary of Dick’s death, and he’s going to his grave. He didn’t care whether or not Clark would catch him. It’s been years since he visited his son.

It’s not difficult to break into his own house. Clark froze his assets and he has nothing. The house is dilapidated and he wishes he can do something about it, but he can’t. He makes his way to the sprawling, unkempt property out in the back, where his parents were buried, where Dick was buried.

When he gets to Dick’s gravemarker, he kneels and tears the vines away from it. He gives it a long stare, reading the words he put on the stone, and keeps his thoughts to himself. He’s sure Clark can hear him. His breath, his heart, the blood flowing in his veins–Clark can hear all of it.

He wipes a tear away and decides to walk over to the house. He gets in easily and breaks into his own room. There’s a white sheet over his bed. Clark must have thought that he might come back someday.

Bruce pulls the sheet off and lays down on bed. The room, like the house, is cold. He can’t light his fireplace. Someone will know that someone’s squatting in Wayne Manor. He’s not actually squatting–it’s his freaking house.

He gets up and sits at the edge of the bed, near the nightstand, and blows the dust away from a picture frame. It’s of him and Dick, when Dick was still young. A little boy. His boy is gone. Has been gone for a long time, and he still can’t accept it. He still hasn’t moved on. He probably never will.

He takes the frame from the night stand and thumbs away the dust that gathered on the glass so can see Dick’s adorable face. He can remember every good night tuck in, every school drop off, every parent-teacher conference, every birthday–everything. He’d do anything to do it all over again.

“You’re not supposed to be here,”

Bruce sighs and puts the frame back on the nightstand. “I know,” he answers.

He’s not sure what’s going to come next. Maybe, he thinks, if it’s his time to go, it’s okay. Though he still has the drive to fight for a better world, he’s tired. Maybe at some point, this fight for freedom became a suicide mission.

Light footsteps come nearer, and he can’t tear his eyes away from Dick’s photograph. He can’t stop looking at the carefree, youthful, innocent smile on little Dick’s face.

“I saw him as my own, you know,”

Bruce doesn’t answer.

“Dick was my son, too,”

He hates the way Dick’s name sounds when Clark says it. He hates the way Clark sounds like he’s invalidating his pain because he lost his own child before it even had the chance to live.

Bruce feels a gentle thumb on his cheek.

“I miss you, Bruce,”

Bruce still doesn’t look at him. “You miss her,” he says. “I’m not her, Clark,”

Of course he’d say that. Of course Clark would say that he missed him just the way he misses Lois. Lois was his wife, and no matter how many times they had clandestine meetups, no matter how many times Clark tells him that he misses him, he was an affair. And that’s all he’ll ever be.

Clark’s telling him he misses him so he’d let his guard down.

And Bruce is angry with himself because it’s working.

“I loved you, too,” Clark says. This time his voice becomes more forceful. “I loved both of you,”

“You loved her,” says Bruce. “I should never have been in the picture,”

But he loved Clark, too. He still loves him. Despite everything. He believes the Clark he loved is still in there.

Clark grabs his face and makes Bruce look him in the eye. “Look at me when I’m talking to you,”

This is it. This is Clark’s true colors right in front of him.

Clark’s brows are furrowed and his lips are turned down into a scowl. Clark’s smiles are all but a memory now.

His hand on Bruce’s jaw is too tight, but Bruce doesn’t say anything. He just wishes Clark will make it quick. He wants Clark to snap his neck so it’ll be done and over with.

But Clark doesn’t do anything.

Clark does kiss him as he slowly loosens his grip on him. And Bruce doesn’t know why he’s kissing back. Clark pushes him onto the bed and pins him down.

“No–Clark!”

Lips press down on his neck as Clark spreads his legs apart. “I loved you, Bruce,” he hears Clark whisper between kisses. He hears his clothes rip.

“NO!”

His belt’s already snapped in half and he feels cool air brush against his legs. His jeans are on the floor, ripped into pieces. Bruce tries to push Clark away but he’s like a wall of concrete on top of him.

Bruce doesn’t want this.

But he misses being held like this. He misses being held by Clark so he lets it happen. He lets it happen because he’ll never have this again. He lets it happen because he wants Clark to hold him again like nothing’s changed.

Like no one’s dead.

Like the world is free.

Like they’re happy.

Like they loved each other the way they did.

Clark breaches him with a little spit. That knocks the air out of him and he cries out but tries to keep his mouth shut.

It hurts.

Clark never did it like this before. Clark’s never been rough with him before.

Bruce hates how it hurts, but welcomes it and holds tightly onto Clark anyway.

Hates how he’s hard even though he’s bleeding.

Hates how he still loves Clark anyway.

Hates how he still believes the person Clark used to be is still in there somewhere.

Hates how he still has hope.

Hates that he’s kissing Clark.

Hates that he’s holding onto Clark’s hair.

Hates that he wishes he can still have this.

Hates that Clark does this with Diana, too.

Hates that he wraps his legs around Clark’s hips as he comes.

Hates how he melts at the words Clark says.

“I love you, Bruce,” Clark pulls away and straightens himself. “But I’ll kill you the next time I see you,”

Maybe next time, it won’t hurt as much.


	2. 9 weeks

When he’s not out to fight, Clark lets him be. 

Right now he’s at the supermarket, dressed in a long coat and a scarf that covers half his face. It’s snowing, so it’s one of those days where hiding in plain sight is easy. He’s there picking up some necessities, and he’s already gone to the drugstore to get some suppressants. His heat is a long way to go, but he wants to be prepared and he hasn’t had suppressants in years, and he doesn’t want to spend it in a haze of need anymore.

He walks by the produce section and his mouth waters at the sight of apples. His basket is almost full, mostly of packs of oatmeal, two cartons of milk, and some bathroom needs, but some more fruit won’t hurt. He inspects the apples and the scent of them makes him want to bite into them immediately.

When he hands over his handpicked apples to the person weighing and packaging them, he holds onto the fruit crate display as his surroundings suddenly swirl around him. He closes his eyes for a few seconds, then opens them again to see the supermarket employee looking worriedly at him.

“Sir?” he says, holding Bruce’s packaged apples. “Are you okay?”

Bruce can see two of him, and he feels like throwing up. The basket he’s holding falls to the floor, and he collapses onto the cold floor tiles.

“Sir!” he rushes out from behind the produce stand. “Someone call an ambulance!”

* * *

 

When Bruce wakes up, he’s not anywhere he thinks is familiar. There are dim lights, and when he looks down on himself, he’s tucked into white sheets, with a IV in his hand, wearing a white hospital gown.

Bruce panics. He immediately sits up and tries to remove the IV, but someone stops him.

“Oh no, please don’t,”

It’s a nurse. He looks at him and tries not to overreact. “I have to get out of here,” he says, hoping the nurse will understand. Everybody knows his name. Everybody knows that they have to surrender him to Superman if they find him.

“Someone will come to talk to you about your health in a minute,” he says, reapplying some medical tape on the IV on his hand that Bruce tried to remove.

Bruce wants to take him down and leave, but he has been feeling shitty lately and if they’ve already done a scan on him and thought that it’s a good idea to put an IV on him, then he must have it bad.

He lies back down on the pillow, then looks out the window. The sun is about to set and the skyline is not something he’s seen before.

The nurse leaves and Bruce is left alone with his thoughts. He has to get out of here before he’s arrested. There is nothing to do, so he studies the room. It’s not decorated or designed like the usual hospital room he’s seen before. Instead of white there are steel gray walls. There aren’t any nightstands or a vase for flowers, or TV for the bored patient.

The door swooshes open and the same nurse comes in with a tray of food for him. It’s not hospital food for sure. They’re only crackers and a bottle of water. Better than nothing.

“You’re not allowed anything with strong scents or colors just yet,” he says as he sets the tray on the bed’s adjustable table. He rolls it over to Bruce and opens the bottle of water. “So please finish this because you’re going to need your strength,”

The nurse fusses over him and checks the IV drip one more time as he eats. He writes some notes on a clipboard with his file on it, asks a few questions about his diet or if he’s taking any medicine or any kind of drug such as suppressants, his eating habits, and his lifestyle including his heats, and sexual activity, and jots down his answers on the clipboard.

The door swooshes open again. Bruce turns his head to look at who’s entered, and what he sees makes him pale.

Superman.

He’s not in a hospital. That’s when he realizes he’s on the Watchtower.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Bruce,” he says evenly. “You can go,” he tells the nurse, who nods, hands him the clipboard, and exits the room. Clark stays by the door, reading the notes written on the file, then approaches the bed and hangs the clipboard at the hook on the edge of the bed.  

Bruce eyes him carefully. He’s not sure if he can fight him off if something happens.

“Don’t be so defensive,” says Clark. “I’m not going to hurt you,”

Bruce frowns. “That didn’t stop you from killing our friends,”

Clark closes his eyes and draws a long breath, then slowly exhales. “Your last heat ended ten weeks ago,” Clark looks at Bruce, who still looks like Clark is about to attack. “And today, you went out to buy food, and collapsed at a supermarket,”

Bruce stares at him.

“Are you aware that you’re approximately nine weeks pregnant?”

Bruce pales. “No,”

“Yes,” Clark replies. “You’ve been scanned, administered everything you’re low on to promote your health and its growth, and I can hear two strong heartbeats coming from you, Bruce,”

“I can’t be,” Bruce looks down on his still flat belly.

“It’s not uncommon to fall pregnant when taken just after the heat or between heats,” says Clark. “And according to your blood tests, you haven’t had any suppressants in years,”

Bruce doesn’t look at him. His eyes are on cold, pale, and shaking hands. If he’s pregnant, Clark’s going to keep him here and he’s not going to let him get rid of it. The room is already devoid of anything he can get his hands on.

“I want this with you, Bruce,” he hears Clark say. Clark sits on the edge of the bed and holds his hand, giving Bruce a little warmth.

But what about Diana? Diana will disembowel him when she finds out Clark bedded him. She’ll rip the child out of him.  

“I’ll deal with Diana,” Clark says as if he can hear Bruce’s thoughts. He presses a kiss to Bruce’s temple. “For now, rest. The best doctors will look after you up here,”

Clark leaves the room.

Leaves Bruce thinking that, he’s stuck on the Watchtower for the rest of his life and that his baby will be raised by the world’s oppressive dictator, or that it too will not have a chance at life should a scorned Diana try to remedy her honor by killing him.

Bruce hates himself for thinking that this can also bring his Clark back to him.


	3. 25 Weeks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Howdoibecomekawaii asked: In your A/B/O AU of Injustice I have a one or two or a lot of head canons I would love to share with you. I think after many escape attempts from Bruce and Clark explaining to him more like screaming at him then having a screaming match with each other Clark would get someone to watch him. But not just anyone. Someone he trusts as much as he trusts Bruce. That's where Diana comes in. Diana in my head would be shock to find out not only did they catch Bruce but that he's pregnant as well. But when she finds out who got Bruce pregnant she'll be pissed but wouldn't show it in front of the others. But she would show how super duper pissed she is in front of Bruce and Clark. I think she wouldn't be as pissed at Bruce. Like she would but not as much pissed at Clark. He's a whole other story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tumblr link: http://cumdumpsterbrucie.tumblr.com/post/154078991761/i-tried-stroke-out-the-part-of-the-ao3
> 
> I also filled in this prompt/comment. The ones with a strike are the parts I didn't fill in. 
> 
> WinterFragilePeace: Okay, I need more of this... Like, I think it has the backbone it needs to be the perfect dark!fic where maybe Bruce basically becomes Clark's kept Omega during Superman's reign of terror. ~~Bruce wants to find a way to stop him, but he has to be careful because he doesn't want anything to happen to his pup.~~ And Clark would make nightly visits to Bruce, sometimes gentle, sometimes angry (depending on his mood), but Bruce never gets any say in it. It just has so much potential for angst ~~and maybe a bittersweet ending where he manages to get his pup somewhere safe, and then succeeds in killing Clark, dying in the process?~~

He’s not as mobile as he used to be at 25 weeks pregnant; his belly is getting heavy. He can’t believe he’s stuck in a room on a station in space, monitored at all hours of the day, and considered fragile. The doctor was right, though. Clark visits every night, usually he comes in with a good mood, cuddling him, peppering his face and belly with kisses, placing his hands on his belly, talking to the baby, and tells Bruce of promises that he and the child will always be safe, healthy, and provided for. He makes promises Bruce wants to believe, but doesn’t.

But sometimes Clark comes in angry. He doesn’t touch Bruce when he’s angry. He just paces in front of Bruce’s bed and tells him of what pissed him off. Bruce doesn’t reply to Clark’s rhetorical questions or react to his ranting. When Clark is angry, his belly tightens and cramps, but doesn’t say anything.

One day, Clark is angry. Bruce gasps, groans, grimaces and holds onto his belly. Blood stains the blanket sheets. Clark calls in the doctor and he’s asked to step out. Another doctor talks to him later, saying he’s not allowed to share his negative emotions with Bruce. Bruce bled a little, but he’s fine now.

The last time Bruce tries to escape, there’s an argument with voices so loud that most of the ones who are watching over Bruce’s health hears it. A doctor tries to get in and reminds Clark of the last time his voice was raised. Bruce isn’t at his reproductive prime anymore and it’s easy to hurt the baby. Very easy.

That shuts Clark up. Bruce bled last time, and this time, he might not stop and lose the baby. But he still turns to Bruce because he still has something to say, that if Bruce does succeed in escaping if he tries to again, he’ll make sure no doctor will help him down on earth. That makes Bruce’s hands grow cold, because as much as he hates the situation he’s in, he’d at least want the child to live.

He stays quiet the next few days. He does what is asked of him and lets the medical staff look after him like they’re supposed to. He reads his books, asks for more materials for any kind of thing to do to keep him occupied. He’s already started knitting tiny socks and gloves.

Clark goes to Diana to ask her to look after Bruce and tells her that he hopes she won’t hurt him because it’s not Bruce’s fault.

Diana is surprised to know that they have Bruce captive for almost four months. She pushes Clark aside and heads to the Watchtower’s wing where they hold Bruce. She barges in the cell and sees a nurse and a doctor helping Bruce fasten a belt to support his distended middle.

She and Clark stand there as the doctor explains to Bruce what the belt does for him and that he shouldn’t depend on it too much, and should be taken off after two or three hours use. The doctor expounds a bit more on what Bruce should follow closely. Bruce nods, sits on the bed as he thanks the doctor and nurse, and they leave.

Diana glares at Clark, and tells him to leave. Clark does but not after telling her not to hurt him.

Bruce watches her approach him, donning not her usual armor, but a floor length, flowing white Greek dress that looked like something the goddess Athena would wear. He knows what Diana can and will do.

For a moment she looks like she pities him. ‘Who bred you?’ she asks.

Bruce looks away from her and resumes his knitting. It’s a blanket this time. He’s knitted enough things, but if he doesn’t do anything, do something, he’ll go insane. ‘Kal did,’ he answers.

Diana stiffens and she clenches her fist. How _dare_ Kal cheat on her. How dare _he_ ask her to look after his affair.

He puts his knitting down and looks at Diana. She doesn’t look angry, but he knows it’s brewing inside her. ‘I don’t blame you if you want to kill me,’ says Bruce.

‘Why did you bed him?’ Diana asks evenly.

‘I didn’t,’ Bruce replies. ‘I was mounted,’

Diana is somewhat shocked to hear that. ‘This child was forced on you,’

Bruce doesn’t know what to say to that and looks at the unfinished blanket on his bed. He finds himself shaking his head. ‘I didn’t want him to. But I didn’t stop him either. I couldn’t,’

Diana wants to strangle him. To think, she held him in high regard once. She was wrong then, too. She wants to hurt him. She wants to rub it in his face that Clark will never choose him. He’ll never be anything more than an affair. But she guesses he already knows.

She leaves the room without another word. She sees Clark speaking with another doctor, who’s telling him Bruce is having a difficult time. When Clark dismisses the doctor, Diana hits him as hard as she can. Clark falls to the floor. The claws that held the garnet gem on her ring made by Hephaestus, cuts Clark’s lip open.

‘I should gut you,’ she seethes. ‘You _dare_ ask _me_ to babysit your _whore_?’

Clark wipes the blood off his chin with the sleeve of his uniform. ‘Bruce isn’t a whore,’ he says as he gets up.

‘Then what do you call a person who seduces someone already committed?’ she demands.

That makes Clark angry. ‘He didn’t seduce me. I came to him. I loved him before I learned to love you,’ he sneers at her. ‘And I still do,’

Clark’s words result in a battle he loses. Clark’s bruised face is on the floor, Diana’s boot is at his temple, the other boot at the small of his back, and her lasso tied around his neck. The wing is dented in several places, and the lights are destroyed.

‘You were committed to Lois,’ she says. ‘You were committed to _me_ ,’ she steps off of him, and fastens the lasso back to her hip. ‘You claimed you were better than them, and yet you are just like any other man,’

She orders one of the present staff to get engineering to fix the wing, then tells the medical staff to move Bruce to another wing, and construct him a cell with a glass wall.

She turns back to Clark, who’s still on the floor, weary and battered. ‘You’re right. It’s not Bruce’s fault. It’s yours. You forced yourself on him. If you ask me which one of you stepped lower, it’s you,’ and then she walks away.


	4. 26 Weeks

26 Weeks

* * *

 

When Bruce wakes up the morning after he hears Diana and Clark fight, he realizes he’s not in the same room he slept in last night. He sits up and studies the room. It’s much larger than the previous one and more furniture decorate it. Even his bed is twice as bigger than his other one. The only difference it has from the minimalist color combination of white, silver, and black is glass.

Not only are there many pieces made of glass (or more like thick, clear, unbreakable plastic), such as the coffee table, the vases, and the sofas with white removable cushions, but one of the four walls of his room is entirely made of glass. He can see the hallway outside and those outside can see him.

He gets off the bed and notices that the bed is on a platform a few wide steps above the living area. There is about three feet of space around the bed before the steps start, maybe space for his doctors to work on. The chair by his bed is also made of clear glass. By header of his bed, which is also made of glass, is a button to call a nurse. He sees the bathroom on the other side of the room, and its walls, fittings, and decorations are glass, too.

He carefully makes his way down the wide steps, and counts them to three. He walks over to the glass wall and puts his hand to it. He feels disgusted with himself. He’s been reduced to an animal, now in a glass box for everybody to watch.

At the end of the hall he sees a red cloth sweep the floor. Must be Clark. He sighs. He looks over to his bed, and the clock on the nightstand beside it says it’s seven in the morning. He decides to take a shower so that eating the breakfast that arrives later will not be as depressing.

* * *

 

Outside, the doctor tells Clark again that Bruce is having a difficult time. Again he reminds Clark that Bruce isn’t in his reproductive prime anymore, but that doesn’t mean Bruce is too old to have this baby.  

Clark nods and asks the doctor what he can do.

The doctor looks at him like he thinks he can’t do what he’s about to suggest. “Make him feel comfortable. Right now he needs a mate, not a warden,”

“I’ve tried that!”

“No, you have not,” the doctor says bravely, but he doesn’t sound scared. He has to tell Clark he’s doing shit somehow. “If you have, the bleeding would stop. He would talk, if not with us then with you, not keep silent, and knit or read all day to keep himself sane. Instead you put Wonder Woman in charge of his confinement, and let her put him in a glass box. None of this is healthy and you know it,”

Clark can’t find it in him to hit the doctor for the insinuation or fire him because he’s right. “What do you want me to do?”

That makes the doctor relax. “First off, change out of that cape and put on your glasses. And I suggest you never visit him in uniform again. Like I said, a mate, not warden. He needs _Mr. Kent_. Bring him flowers, trinkets, cuddle, show him you care. Go to bed with him, be gently intimate with him, wake up in the morning with him, though not necessarily in that order and not every night; have meals and meaningful conversations with him, tell him sweet nothings, do many things and nothing together—things mates do,” he waits for Clark to confirm he understands, which comes as several nods. The doctor too gives Clark a nod. “Very well. If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Kent, I need to talk with the nutritionist for Bruce’s breakfast and the pharmacist for his medication,”

Clark watches the doctor walk away. He turns his head to the glass wall down the hall, and sees Bruce walk away from the glass.

* * *

 

Diana doesn’t sleep in the chambers she shared with Clark anymore. It’s understood that whatever they had ended when Clark decided to force himself on Bruce that night several months ago.

She dislikes what she’s been asked to do, yet she finds himself interested in how Bruce will power through this ordeal. She also realizes her ill feelings toward Bruce isn’t as bad as she thought they were. Still that doesn’t mean she doesn’t hate him a little for unknowingly stealing Clark from her. None of this is his fault, but Clark’s. If Clark hadn’t used his strength on Bruce this wouldn’t have happened. She supposes Clark wouldn’t have listened even if Bruce told him no. And Bruce did tell her he said no.

She also knows that Clark, like in the first months of Bruce’s captivity, will continue to give Bruce his attention. Maybe she’s always known that Bruce had always been the center of Clark’s affections, even when Clark was committed to Lois. Clark might have loved Lois and Diana, but he will always love Bruce more, despite all the lingering hate and resentment.

Wearing a light blue Greek dress with her lasso at her hip and her hair up in a high ponytail, she walks through the hallways of the Bruce was transferred to. She isn’t wearing her red boots this time, but some gladiator sandals with no heels. Bruce comes into view as she approaches the glass wall.

Bruce is eating breakfast alone, dressed in his usual hospital gown, facing away from the glass wall and looking at the windows that show an animated meadow.

“Good morning, Ma’am,” a nurse greets Diana and gives her a clipboard.

“How is he?” Diana asks in lieu of a greeting.

“Well, so far,” he answers. “He’s had a shower, and has been studying the room. He put out his knitting and reading materials in the living area,”

“No sickness or bleeding?” Diana flips through the papers that contain the summary of the status of Bruce’s health for the past few weeks.

“No, Ma’am,”  

She returns the clipboard to him. “Please ask the nutritionist to have the cook prepare for a cup of coffee and some bread for me and bring it to Bruce’s table. I’ll join him for breakfast,”

“Yes, Ma’am,”

* * *

 

“I’m not allowed coffee,” Bruce says, confused when his favorite nurse (he’s really nice) comes in with a tray. He places a cup and a fresh pot of coffee on the table, together with a small boat of milk and a container with sugar cubes.

“It’s not for you, Mr. Wayne,” he smiles at him as he sets the table with another plate, a table napkin, a butter knife and fork, a basket of bread, a plate of fluffy scrambled eggs, and a stick of butter in a clear container. “Eat up, okay? You need to stay healthy, and don’t think about sneaking even a sip of that coffee,”

Bruce nods.

The nurse leaves, and a moment later, Diana sits in front of him, and breaks into her bread. “Good morning, Bruce,”

“Good morning, Diana,” he says cautiously, watching her pour coffee into her cup.

“How do you like your new living arrangements?”

Bruce takes a sip of the chilled strawberry yoghurt drink. “This is hardly living,” he answers, but he doesn’t complain since he hasn’t had anything this comfortable in years.

“Then how do you like your new cell?”

Bruce hums, agreeing with the choice of words. “Has a lot less privacy but also a lot less bare,” he resumes eating his bowl of oatmeal with apples and cinnamon.

For a few moments, there is only silence. Diana eats her bread and eggs, and sips her coffee, while Bruce forces himself to finish the bowl of oatmeal.

“Do you dislike the food?” Diana asks.

Bruce finishes the yoghurt drink. “If I recall correctly, cinnamon isn’t supposed to be pungent,”

“Why didn’t you tell your nurse you don’t like the food?”

“I was told to eat what is given to me,” Bruce answers. “I will try make it to the bathroom and not stain the floor,” he takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, rubbing circles on his belly.

“Who told you this?” Diana asks evenly.

“Clark did. I believe this is punishment for the last escape attempt,”

Diana sets her knife and fork down, wipes her mouth with the napkin before getting to her feet. “Go to the bathroom and relieve yourself if you can’t keep it down. I’ll have a word with the doctor,”

Bruce rushes to the bathroom and almost doesn’t make it to the toilet.

Diana orders the nutritionist to have a chat with Bruce and ask him what kinds of food disagrees with him and to not serve him any of it.

Bruce is grateful when he sees an omelet on the table when he emerges from the bathroom some time later. Diana is sitting at her spot on the table, done with her breakfast. She spends an hour and a half with him before leaving.

* * *

 

“You changed the orders I gave,”

“When you give the responsibilities of caring for your whore to someone else, they can change their approach of care when the whore’s health calls for it,”

“Bruce isn’t a whore—”

“GO ON!” Diana yells just as Kal raises his voice then a hand to strike her. “Go on, I dare you. Hit me for my opinion just like how you _raped_ him when he said no,”

Kal’s jaw tightens at Diana’s provocation, then he lowers his hand.

Diana says nothing as she watches Kal change into a red plaid shirt, jeans, work boots, and puts on his glasses. It’s the first time she sees Clark in years.

Kal leaves the room and Diana punches a hole into the wall.

* * *

 

Clark climbs into bed with Bruce later that night, spooning him and putting his hand on his belly. Bruce doesn’t know why he welcomes it. It’s the best sleep he’s had in a very long time.


	5. 27 Weeks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd wooo

27 weeks

* * *

 

Kal has been spending his mornings and nights with Bruce for a week now, and Bruce’s disposition seems somewhat less guarded. According to the medics, he’s eating better, sleeping better, is gaining weight instead of losing it, and his health and mood have improved. Diana chocks it all up to the attention Kal is giving him. The doctor told her what he told Kal, and of course, she scoffed at the idea but she knew he was right.

On the fifth morning of Kal spending days and nights with Bruce, when Diana arrives, Kal is about to leave to attend to matters of ruling the planet. They’ve just finished breakfast. She stands on the other side of the glass wall, and watches Kal set down the used table napkin and stand up to move over to Bruce, who is sitting opposite him. Kal gives him a kiss on the forehead and she can read that Kal’s lips that he tells Bruce, “I’ll see you tonight,”

Kal walks toward exit which is near the glass wall.

“I see you’re listening to the doctor,” says Diana when Kal emerges from the cell. “Is it fun playing house?”

Kal removes his glasses. “Why, jealous?”

Diana snorts and turns her gaze back to Bruce. “Hardly. Why would I ever want to sleep with my rapist?”

She hears the glasses break.

“I hate him. Now I pity him, too,”

“And why is that?”

“Well,” said Diana thoughtfully. “If you were forced to sleep with General Zod, or gods forbid, the Joker, I’d pity you too,” she moved to enter the cell. “What? Are you about to hit me again?” she looks straight into Kal’s angry eyes. “Or maybe even lobotomize me, too? You’re welcome to try,”

For a moment, they lock eyes. The only thing holding Kal back is the news that Bruce’s health had improved because of his care and presence, and he doesn’t want to undo that progress.

“Excuse me, Superman, sir?”

Diana recognizes the voice as one of Kal’s secretaries.

“Your meeting with the minister for education for the United states is in 20 minutes,”

Diana smirks at him. “Well, Kal, you shouldn’t keep your audience waiting,” 

* * *

 

Clark clenches his fist as Diana enters the cell.

He can remember the doctor’s words clearly. “I know you had attempts of ‘being a mate’ before you asked Wonder Woman to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid again, your attempts were commendable but also mediocre at best, but that isn’t entirely the case from someone else’s perspective. Superman, Mr. Wayne is the mother of your child, not an artificial womb in a lab. It is important that you consider his emotional health because negative emotions impact his ability to carry this child to term. He can and will lose this child if you don’t respond and act accordingly,”

Last night, like every other day and night this week, was uneventful. Clark tried to make conversation, but Bruce wasn’t and always hadn’t been for small talk. Clark knows there is nothing for them to talk about, but he wants to try. After all, he wants that child healthy. They have breakfast and dinner together, and Clark had been able to come back at noon to have lunch together twice. Since Bruce didn’t want to talk, their mealtimes are quiet, and Clark doubts Bruce feels comfortable.

He makes his way to his chambers, throws away the broken glasses, and quickly slips into uniform. The secretary is outside his door, and hands him a file when he steps out.

“Ask Bruce’s doctor when his next sonogram is,” he tells the secretary as he opens up the file. “Tell the medics I will be there for it, and all succeeding exams he will undergo. If any one of those exams fall on a day where a prior commitment has been made, remember that these exams—no, anything regarding Bruce—will supersede it,”

“Yes, sir,” the secretary answers.

* * *

 

Bruce gets up from his chair, hand under the dome of his heavy belly, and gathers together the used plates and utensil to make the busboy’s life and duties much easier.

“Diana, good morning,” greets Bruce. “You’re early,”

“Good morning, Bruce,” replies Diana. “I check on your health and discuss it with the medics, should there be anything that needs changing to help improve you and your child’s health,”

Bruce clears up the table. “I see,”

Diana sits down on the sofa in the living area. “How are you doing?”

Bruce walks past her and pads up the stairs to his bed and makes the sheets. “I thought you looked through my files,”

“I did,” she answers. “I want to hear how you’re doing from you,”

Bruce hums dully as he smooths the sheets over the bed. “I’m fine,” he says automatically.

Of course he’s not fine. He’s held captive and forced to carry a child he doesn’t want. His back aches, his feet are swollen, he can’t eat what he craved, and the nausea hasn’t subsided. The doctor is glad he’s gaining weight, but he knows he looks smaller. The constant light cramps are gone and he’s just entered his third trimester, but he feels like his belly is about to drop and burst from the weight. He’s humiliated that he wants Clark’s presence when there’s nothing he wants more than to be able to leave.

He knows this Clark is just pretending. Like how, in the first few months, Clark visited him and talked to the baby. It’s a lie. It’s all a lie but he wants it all.

When the bed is made, he presses the heel of his hand to his aching back in an attempt to relieve the pain. He exhales, and grimaces as he slowly sits down on the bed. Some exercise would probably relieve the backpain, but he’s not allowed any strenuous physical activity so he’s lost much of his muscle mass and has gained a little fat under his skin, softening the sharp definition of his once toned body. There is no mirror in the cell, but he can see his reflection on the glass wall, and it’s the nurses who tend to shaving his beard and cutting his hair. He’s not allowed near anything breakable or sharp (not even pencils or pens, his knitting needles were too dull to pierce into anything, and it’s the nurses who come in and snip the yarn for him when he’s done) for Clark fears him taking his own life or the child’s, out of spite.

Bruce’s favorite nurse enters the cell. “Does something hurt?” he asks immediately as he rushes to the bed.

Bruce takes another breath and releases the air bit by bit. “Just my back,” he answers. “No cramps,”

“I can draw you a bath if you like. Just soaking can help with the backpain and get the weight off your back for a while,” the nurse offers.

“Go,” says Diana. “Soak,” she stands up. “I will return at noon to join you for a meal,”

Bruce watches her leave first before following the nurse to the bathroom.

When the bath is drawn and Bruce is in the relaxing warmth of the water, the nurse (Bruce decided not to ask for his name so he won’t get more attached to him) leaves the bathroom and sits on a chair just outside it.

The bathroom and shower doors don’t have locks. The only thing locked in the cell is the main entrance, where his doctors and…custodians, enter and exit through. The bathroom fittings are glass, including the bathtub, so the nurse can see everything.

Bruce sinks into the hot water.

 _They_ can see everything. Clark and Diana made sure Bruce knows, sees, and feels he’s no longer his own person.  This is what it feels like to be a lab rat. Imprisoned within glass walls where everything is measured, controlled, and dictated.

The child shifts inside him. Suddenly, he’s wondering if this child will resent him for not wanting him.

* * *

 

Clark rushes through the meeting with the education minister when his secretary says a nurse is hands on with Bruce. He lets the minister talk for about ten minutes to give him the gist of his plans are. Clark nods here and there, and when he’s had enough, he raises a hand and hands the minister a folder.

“Thank you for your suggestions, minister,” says Clark and stands up, all while the minster reads through the papers in the folder. “But I’m afraid I can’t entertain your ideas right now. Something else needs my attention. Should I find something that needs changing for my plans to educate the young, I’ll inform you. For now, implement this curriculum immediately. You have two weeks,”

The minister looks like he’s about to lose his head, and Clark leaves for Bruce’s cell.

* * *

 

“Sir,” the nurse stands up when Clark enters the room.

Clark is in a blue plaid shirt, jeans, and work boots. “What’s going on?”

“He said his back hurt, so I suggested a warm soak,” answered the nurse.

Bruce can’t hear what they’re saying, so he closes his eyes and stays in the water. Clark enters the bathroom, sits by the tub, and keeps Bruce company until Bruce tells him he wants to get out of the water.

Clark holds onto Bruce gently but firmly so that he won’t slip on the glass tub or the tiled floor. A rug by the tub soaks up the water dripping from Bruce’s body, and Clark wraps a towel around him, then hands him the hospital gown when he’s dry.

The nurse leaves and Clark offers to massage his back. Bruce reluctantly agrees, and the massage provides him even greater relief.

Clark doesn’t leave for any of the day’s plans and Diana doesn’t enter the cell when she sees Clark having lunch with him.

Bruce hates it that the omega in him loves the attention. Loves the way Clark shows that he’s more important than work.

He hates it.  

 


	6. 30 Weeks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd

30 weeks

* * *

Bruce wakes up out of breath, and drenched in his own sweat and slick. His skin is prickling down to the tip of his toes and he feels like he wants to tear his skin off himself.

The room is dimly lit and he can see a blurry Clark shushing him and trying to calm him down.

“What’s going on?” he manages to croak out in between pants. “It’s so hot…” he pants as his vision slowly sharpens out. “Clark,”

Clark helps him upright, then reaches for a glass of cold water from the nightstand and hands it over to Bruce to drink. Bruce downs the entire glass. He glances at the clock on the nightstand on his side of the bed and sees that it’s way past his alarm. It’s 8:49am.

“False heat,” Clark answers softly. He sets the glass back down on the nightstand, and combs Bruce’s sweat matted hair back with his fingers.

Bruce closes his eyes and lies limp in Clark’s arms, panting and clinging to him. He’s not going to ask Clark for help. He’s just glad he’s there for him to hold onto, but he’s not going to say anything. He knows there’s no way for this subside unless he gets penetrated.

He feels an ice-cold towel on his forehead, which Clark uses to wipe down the sweat from his cheeks and neck. That only makes him feel better for a few seconds.  

“Bruce,” says Clark, “The AC is down as far as it can go. You can’t take any medication, you’ll get sick if I let you soak in cold water, and your skin might get burned if I try to use my freeze breath on you,”

He knows. He knows Clark is telling him nothing and no one else but he can help make the heat go away.

Bruce shakes his head.

“Don’t be stubborn, Bruce,” Clark starts to undress him.

“No,” Bruce tries to get Clark’s hands off of him. “No, please,”

“You don’t want the gown off?”

“No,” he shakes his head again.

Clark tears it off him anyway. If Bruce sweat like this with the AC on, he’ll get sick.  

Bruce hears Clark tell the nurse to raise the AC temperature, and he feels Clark put a dry towel to his face and body to wipe the sweat away. Clark’s touch sets him on fire. He unconsciously starts to grind his hips on the mattress. It’s his body’s way of telling him it’s desperate for its mate.

The nurse doesn’t come back. That might mean that Clark dismissed him. Bruce can’t tell if the temperature in the room has risen since still feels like the only way his body will cool down is if it’s dunked in Arctic waters.

Clark manhandles him and puts him on his hands and knees.

“No…” Bruce pleads through the tears that start to flow. “Please, no,”

The pleas fall on deaf ears. Moments later, Clark is inside him and he comes. Bruce claws at the sheets, grunts, groans, and cries a litany of ‘no,’ ‘don’t,’ and ‘please’ as Clark pounds into him.

He comes several more times before Clark sits up and puts him on his lap. Bruce’s back is on Clark’s bare chest, and Clark’s hand is at his neck, his mouth on his shoulder, threatening to bite him.

Bruce sees a figure by the glass wall. He wishes with all his being that it’s one of the doctors. But when his blurry vision clears, he pales as he discovers it’s not a doctor or a nurse.

It’s Damian. Smirking at him.

“No, no,” he begs again. “Please, please stop---hnng!” he closes his eyes as Clark’s knot slips in and floods his insides.

He can’t stop coming, clenching, and shivering on that knot. It’s the best knot he’s ever had. He feels ashamed that it feels so damn good that he passes out.

* * *

 

When he wakes up, he’s wearing a fresh gown, the bed’s linens have been changed, and the tingling sensation in his skin is gone. The false heat must have subsided already.

Bruce tries to sit up, but his groin and entire hip region aches. He glances at the clock. It’s 4:16pm. He attempts to sit up again, and takes the glass of water from the nightstand to take a few gulps.

“So the great Batman is now nothing more than a breeding stock,”

He turns to where the voice is coming from.

Damian is by the cell entrance, wearing a red version of Dick’s uniform. How dare he.

“And I thought you couldn’t sink any lower,” Damian smirks. He studies Bruce’s appearance. He’s not the built person he remembers.

Bruce looks away from him and that makes Damian angry.

He storms over to him and grabs his jaw. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

Bruce meets Damian’s angry gaze with his own blank one.

“Are you really that desperate that you let Superman get you pregnant so you could say with him? Even real whores don’t do anything that drastic and disgusting to married men,”

Diana appears on the other side of the glass wall, and Clark enters the room with Bruce’s favorite nurse who sets a tray of food on the dining table. They watch the nurse take Bruce’s vitals.

Diana presses the speak button on the metal wall wall next to the glass, and speaks to Damian. There is static before Diana’s voice flows through. “Between adultery and fratricide, killing your own brother seems more disgusting to me,”

“Excuse me?” Damian glares at her.

Clark walks up to Damian and throws him away from the bed. Damian hits the metal wall near Diana. “If you think I’ll let you insult him and touch him where I can hear and see you, think again,” Clark watches Damian sink to the ground, groaning and holding his midsection in pain. “Bruce is right to disown you. I wouldn’t want a son like you either. You are _nothing_ , and _nothing_ like him, and never will be anywhere as great as he is. Now get out of my sight before I decide to add internal bleeding to your two broken ribs and bruised humerus,”

Damian looks up and Bruce back is to him. Bruce didn’t even bother turning to look at him.

Nurses enter the cell and try to help Damian up. “Don’t touch me!” he growls at the nurses, but they hold onto him anyway and herd him to another room to tend to his injuries.

* * *

 

“You should eat,” frowns Bruce’s favorite nurse when Bruce pushes the food away from him.

Bruce notices the nurse has blue eyes.

“Yes, I do have blue eyes,” says the nurse.

He said that out loud. “You remind me of my son,” Bruce tells him. “I loved him very much,”

“We’ve been told he was an extraordinary man,” the nurse nods.

“He was the world to me. I wish I told him I loved him more often,”

Bruce wishes a lot of things. Sometimes he wishes he had been in Lois’ place. Then the world would probably still be free.

“I’m sure he knew just how much you loved him,” says the nurse.  “But please, Mr. Wayne, you have to eat,”

Bruce shakes his head.

“If I bring you something you like, will you eat?”

After a few thoughtful moments, Bruce tells him he’d like banana pancakes even though it’s 7pm. The nurse leaves, and comes back thirty minutes later with five pieces of pancakes stacked together, with a generous dollop of buttercream on top, and a boat of maple syrup.

Bruce thanks the nurse, and takes his time eating his pancakes, but finishes them.

* * *

 

At 10 in the evening, Bruce is getting ready to get some sleep.

At 10:30, he is wakened by a weight dipping the other side of the bed.

He turns to his other side and puts his arm around his bed mate, and he feels a kiss to his forehead. “Good night, Bruce,” whispers Clark. “I love you,”

Bruce groans sleepily. “Love you, too,”

In the morning, he remembers what he said last night. He wishes he hadn't said it. 


	7. 31 Weeks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to my friend @therapyfortravesty for all the enabling and help figuring this chapter out. You are the biggest reason this is even still ongoing. Thank you so so so so much!

31 Weeks

* * *

Clark decides to stay longer that morning. They have breakfast together and Bruce even lets Clark with him in the shower. He lets Clark touch him. Clark lathers the soap and shampoo on him, and Bruce feels disgusted that he enjoys the undivided attention he’s getting. The way Clark’s hands gently sweep his skin, the way his fingers comb through his unkempt graying hair, the way the warm water does as it washes the lather away.

They step out of the shower and Clark makes sure he has a firm hold Bruce to keep him on steady feet. One slip can injure both Bruce and the child. He pulls a bathrobe on, then grabs a large towel from the rack and wraps it around Bruce, and then pulls another smaller one to use to dry Bruce’s hair. Bruce stands there and lets Clark dry him. When most of the water is out of Bruce’s hair, he deposits the towel in the hamper.

“Feel better?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Bruce nods. “Much better,”

It’s been a few days since the heat, and honestly, he had even less mood for anything after that day, especially after Clark got physical with Damian.

“Good,” Clark places a kiss on his forehead. “I’m glad,”

They exit the bathroom and Clark helps Bruce slip into a fresh gown. When he’s dressed, Bruce climbs on the bed and resumes his knitting. It’s a nearly done scarf. It’s never cold in the cell and always at the right temperature. The scarf isn’t for anyone either, but Bruce keeps on knitting it because the color reminds him of what Dick used as Nightwing.

Clark joins him on the bed after pulling on some sweatpants, placing Bruce between his legs and presses his bare chest against Bruce’s back. Bruce tenses when he feels Clark’s lips on his neck, but relaxes a moment later.

Clark enjoys these moments when he just gets to hold Bruce. Clark finds their heartbeats relaxing; Bruce is calm and steady, while the child’s fast like a hummingbird’s beating wings. He wanted this with Lois. He gets to have it with Bruce. Diana never showed any interest so he never asked. He figures Diana will never want the same things he wants.

Because he lets Clark touch him, Clark takes this as an invitation to touch him even more, touch him all the time. Clark holds him close when they sleep, keeps a large, warm hand on Bruce’s belly, and places kisses on everywhere he can get his mouth on. When he’s done dressing Bruce, he even helps with his shoes if Bruce finds it difficult because of his back.

Bruce hates it that he relaxes into those touches. That he melts into Clark’s warmth like he’s not imprisoned in a glass cell thousands of miles above the earth. 

Bruce is particularly worried about being bitten. It dawns on him that he’s terrified of it, when he feels Clark’s fingers and lips brush over where he’s supposed to bite.

Nothing can stop Clark from biting him. Just like that morning when he woke up in a false heat, Clark can pin him down and do anything to him.

“I’ll be back late tonight,” Clark says.

Bruce hums. He supposes it’s because it’s half past ten. He knows well enough not to ask why.

“There are university students rioting somewhere in England. Diana’s already there,”

Bruce drops what he’s knitting and turns to Clark. “Please don’t hurt them,” he says suddenly. “Please don’t hurt them. They’re children,”

“We’ll see about what should happen to children who misbehave, Bruce,” answers Clark. “Okay? Now calm down. That’s bad for the baby,”

Clark doesn’t stay for lunch. He gives Bruce a kiss to his temple, repeats that he’ll be back late, and leaves.

The scarf is done before his lunch arrives.

Bruce spends some time just holding the blue scarf, thinking of how Dick as a child, or maybe even as an adult, would have tackled him and bawled out crying for making it himself if he gave it to him.

‘Don’t hurt them. They’re children,’ he thinks about what he told Clark.

Damian was a child, too. He did more than hurt him. Maybe that’s why he felt a rush of terror when he saw Damian smirking at him from behind the glass wall as he was being mounted. Because Damian was a child. His child. And maybe that’s also a tiny enough reason to care what Damian thought of him.

The door to his cell opens and is favorite nurse comes in with a glass of orange juice and a sandwich. “It’s chicken today,” he says, setting it down on the table.

Bruce sets the scarf down, swings his legs off the bed, and slips his feet into his shoes. Before he could stand, there’s a ruckus by his cell entrance.

“You’re not allowed in here!” he hears a nurse yell. “HEY!”

There’s the sound of a metal trolley crashing, some metal trays and medical instruments clanging, and bodies hitting the walls.

“Get him!”

“Don’t let him get away!”

“LET GO OF ME!”

“Get security!”

“He KNOCKED OUT the security!”

“I SAID LET GO!”

“Then tranq him!”

“Do I look like Oliver Queen to you?!”

Damian, out of uniform and in bandages, sweatpants, and hair in a messy ponytail, barges through the door and runs into the room, panting and angry like a bull.

* * *

Clark descends to where the authorities are herding the swarm of students after confiscating their protest signs. They’re nothing he hasn’t seen before and this isn’t the first school protest either.

The chattering ceases when those on the ground see him. His feet touch the ground and he takes a few moments to talk to the commanding officer trying to take control of the situation. Clark nods here and there. Diana’s already heard what the officer has to say, so she stays a few steps back. When Clark lifts himself off the ground, Diana flies up with him and hovers over the crowd of students, regime soldiers, and worried professors and parents.

“I’m only saying this once,” Clark says out loud, addressing each and every student. “Someone asked me not to use a heavy hand to relay my message because you are children. Children should listen and you deliberately disobey and misbehave,”

Some of them are angry, some of them are terrified. Clark would appreciate it if they stayed terrified.

“However, I will take his advice just this once to serve as an example,” he continued. “For now, I’ll let all of you return to class. If I get another one of these pitifully bothersome protests, whether or not they are in schools, whether or not you are children, you and your accomplices will be punished severely. This means that my officers can dispose of you without having to report your insolence,”

No one says anything, so Diana tells Clark they’re needed at the Moscow Kremlin. Clark nods and leaves the situation to his soldiers, and heads to Russia.

* * *

Behind Damian, a nurse is ready to fire a tranquilizing dart at him, and his favorite nurse rushes to stand between him and Damian.

“Stay right here you are Mr. Al Ghul,” says his favorite, also drawing a tranquilizer gun from his hip.

“No,” says Bruce.

“What?” says the nurse behind Damian.

“He’s not supposed to be here Mr. Wayne,” his favorite aims his tranquilizer at Damian. “He’s _not allowed_ in here,”

“Let him in,” Bruce eyes Damian, who’s visibly calming down. “Don’t hurt him,”

“Fine,” the other nurse hisses. He’s pissed that he was thrown off a wall for this. “But I’ll stay right here,” he glares at Damian’s back. “If you even so much as blink at Mr. Wayne wrong, I’ll shoot you with enough tranquilizer to knockout a horse,”

His favorite gestures for Damian to move to the dining table. “Sit at the table. Keep your distance. You’re not allowed near him. Talk but don’t raise your voice,”

Damian scoffs as he sits at the table. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? Whisper?”

“Speak like that again and I’ll tranq you,” his favorite moves from the other side of the bed to Bruce’s side. “Stay there. Move one step closer and we’ll—”

“I know, you’ll tranq me,” Damian doesn’t take the threat seriously.

It takes a few long minutes before Damian speaks. For a while he just sits there, clenching his fist and tightening is jaw, thinking of what to say.  

“It was an accident,” Damian says finally.

Bruce doesn’t say anything. Suddenly all the grief he’s been trying to ignore for the baby’s sake washes over him like a heavy waterfall.

“It was an accident!” he insists.

Bruce exhales, trying his best to stay calm. “I know,”

“Then why?” Damian demands.

This time it’s Bruce who takes a few moments to gather his thoughts. “He was my son. You were a child put into my care,”

“I’m your son, too!”

Bruce cuts him off. “I loved him longer!”

That catches the nurses off guard. They’ve never heard Bruce yell.

“I raised him! Dick was _my son_! I held him when he cried, tucked him into bed, made sure he ate his vegetables, did his homework, stayed out of trouble. And your actions cut his life short because you wanted _attention_!”

“I was a child! Your child!” Damian hisses. “I needed you to pay attention!”

“The attention you wanted had to be earned!” yells Bruce. He’s angry. He has to calm down. “I paid you attention. I spent time with you, taught you morals, the difference between good and bad, tried to teach you patience. But you wanted me to pat your head like you were a model child, when you clearly were not,”

“I’m the real son!” Damian hits the table with a fist, making the glass of orange juice fall and wet the sandwich beside it, ruining Bruce’s lunch. “You treated me like an obligation, and I have to fight for the attention you give to someone who’s adopted? And what, you think you’re this perfect parent? Just because you think you raised Dick right?”

“I did raise him well, and I did raise him right. The good inside him is what I can only hope to have in me. I’m not a good parent, and judging by what you think I’ve done when you were a child, I’m very well aware I’m the worst parent on earth,”

Damian snorts. “Yeah, you're right. At least you know you've been nothing but the worst parent a child can have. But you're the one who's stuck here, caged for him, ready to be mounted any time like a bitch in heat. He was a father to me than you ever were. But you can't help it can you? Your wet cunt just had to take that away from me, too!”

Bruce takes a few deep breaths and doesn’t respond. He knows Damian wants him to say something so that they can keep arguing.

“I looked up to you,” Damian says after a while. “I put you on a pedestal,”

“Get out!” Clark is at the door. “GET OUT!” he yells angrily on top of his lungs.

“Clark!” Bruce gets to his feet and rushes toward Damian when Clark grabs the child’s neck, choking him. He eases Clark’s hand off Damian, then pulls him over to the bed, shushing him in an attempt to calm him. “Shh,”

The nurses escort Damian out of the room.

Bruce cups Clark’s face, presses his forehead to his and continues to gently shush him. “It’s fine. Nothing happened,” Bruce guides Clark’s hand to his belly. The skin is soft and firm at the same time under the gown. “We’re safe,”

Clark holds onto him, concentrating his hearing on his child’s fast heartbeat, nose in Bruce’s neck. Safe.  “We were in Moscow. I flew out when I heard—if he ever did anything to you…”

“Shh,”

Diana stands by the glass wall. She doesn’t like what she sees. Though she’s not sure which one she finds more revolting, Bruce as an affair, or Bruce giving in.


	8. 32 Weeks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd because i wrote this on google docs on newly reformatted laptop without any word processor (i hate word pad). also i got my wisdom teeth removed and i had this idea in my head right before the surgery (i was sedated) and i can't not write it i have to get it out

When Bruce wakes up that morning, his back is pressed against Clark's broad chest, and somehow he feels content. Clark's hand is on his belly, a modest weight that's nice to have there but he's also already tired of the baby's weight inside him. He knows it's just about a little less than four pounds, but his size, stretch marks, and the ache in his lower back makes it feel a lot more than that.  


He puts his hand over Clark's. He feels the rough skin under his own calloused hand. 

He feels Clark's lips on his neck. "Good morning, Bruce," he whispers against his skin. He caresses the taught skin of Bruce's belly. 

Bruce hums contentedly in reply, leaning into the touches. He doesn't turn around, but he lets Clark's hand wander to his hips and his thighs but not his groin or chest. They're not allowed to be intimate anymore, not after that moderate heat. Bruce is grateful for that. 

Clark's hand ends up under the dome of his belly, thumb rubbing to and fro. Bruce feels Clark's lips turn up into a smile as he kisses his shoulder, right when the child shifts under the stretched skin.

[[MORE]]

Bruce winces. It moves a lot more frequently now, kicks a lot harder, and presses more into his bladder. Sometimes it takes too much of his breath and the false contractions are starting. They don't feel too bad; they just catch him unprepared most of the time. He's also glad that most of the time they come, Clark isn't in the room.

They lie in bed for a while more, then Bruce's favorite nurse, together with some others, comes in with their breakfast. He and Clark sit up and see the impressive spread. 

There's a stack of pancakes and another of waffles with generous dollops of buttercream on top, dripping with maple syrup. There are plates of lean bacon and scrambled eggs. They get up and sit at the table, and see that there are a couple of French toasts stuffed with cream cheese and berries, freshly brewed coffee for Clark, and a glass of chilled milk for Bruce. 

Bruce stares at the amount of food. 

"I got up at dawn to tell them I wanted a nice breakfast with you," says Clark. 

"I...thank you," says Bruce quietly. "It looks very appetizing," he serves himself some of the French toast (they're without cinnamon thank the heavens), and bacon and eggs. 

Usually, they just give him something simple when he's alone. Toast, eggs, and cheese. Tuna wraps with cucumber and light mayo. Some pasta. Nothing special. Just food for one. But seeing the food today makes Bruce's chest feel warm. It looks hearty and feels homemade, not measured and sanitized. He hasn't had anything that looked this good in a while. 

"What would you like for lunch?" Clark asks, digging into his plate of everything. 

"Nothing in particular," answers Bruce after a moment. "I eat what they give me," 

He rarely ever asks for anything if ever he doesn't like what's given to him, like that stack of pancakes after his false heat. 

His favorite nurse comes in and sets a small cup and a glass of water near him. They contain his vitamins. 

Clark nods as he eats. "I might leave early today. I have something to attend to, but I'll be back by lunch," 

Bruce takes a few seconds to glance at Clark. "Okay," he answers as he goes back to his food. 

Clark is the one who eats most of the spread. Bruce eats what’s given to him and doesn’t ask for more. He knows it’s for his own good. The food prepared for him is most of the time calculated, making sure he’s healthy, and gains the right amount of weight for how far along he is, and made sure that the baby gets everything it needs, nothing less but also nothing far too much than needed. 

After breakfast, the plates are cleared and Bruce does a little stretching, then walks around the room to get his blood flowing, stretch his legs, and to get the minimal exercise he’s allowed to have. Clark watches him do this every day now. It unnerves him. 

Diana doesn’t come see him daily like she did. He knows Clark put her in charge. The moment Clark decides to show up at every single thing that happens to him, whether it’s a small progress or a little blotting in his underwear, makes Bruce realize that Clark wants more than just this child from him. Clark wants to raise this child with him. Here. In a sanitized glass cell in a space station. Bruce isn’t sure he can do that. 

He’s not sure but when he’s alone, he finds himself humming while rubbing circles on his belly, talking to child softly about how the world used to be, how kind Clark was, how the world had more to offer it, asking it to forgive him. He finds himself reminiscing Dick’s childhood. When he used to bring him to school, when he and Alfred took care of him when he was sick, when he spent hours thinking of what Dick would like to receive on his birthday, playing basketball with him… 

“You okay?” Bruce looks up and sees Clark’s worried face. “Maybe you should sit back down,” he leads Bruce back to the bed, where he presses a hand to Bruce’s lower back. 

Bruce gasps and groans. The massages help. These massages used to turn sexual, but Clark is extra careful now. Clark’s sudden shift, his gentleness, the softness in his voice, frightens Bruce. To him it’s a volcano waiting to erupt. 

“Thank you,” says Bruce gratefully, reaching for Clark’s hands. He lifts them off his back, lies down, and puts down back down on his belly. The child is moving. 

Clark can’t help the pride that surges through him. “If your back still causes some discomfort, maybe a soak will help. Come, I’ll draw you a bath,” 

Clark does just that. When Bruce is soaking in the warm water, he kisses Bruce’s forehead and tells him he needs to go. Bruce nods, and watches Clark leave.

* * *

Clark’s been in a good mood the last few days. He’s cleared his week and decides to spend it with Bruce instead of working too hard running an entire planet. His appointed officers do their job well anyway, and they’re only allowed to call him should Diana be unable to handle things herself. Clark doubts Diana needs him for anything. 

He’s also glad that whatever happened between Bruce and Damian didn’t blow up or get worse than a few raised voices. Bruce hadn’t said anything about, not that he would ever share anything with Clark. Clark understands and he won’t push. 

For now, Clark is stupidly happy about how Bruce is becoming more open. He no longer tensed first when Clark touched him, or moved away when Clark tried to pull him in, nor did it feel like Bruce has resigned to his touch. Bruce is visibly even more relaxed that he’s ever been and just that makes Clark want to never let him out of his arms. He still remained silent and won’t talk unless spoken to, but maybe the best thing about Bruce’s openness also included the stomach to look at Clark willingly. Before, Bruce only looked at him as a reaction, or if Clark held his chin. 

Bruce also touched his face. Even though Clark didn’t like the chain of events that got them there, he was thankful for the small change of heart. It makes Clark want to celebrate. 

He celebrates by sort of taking over the kitchen of Bruce’s dietician and cook a few hours before noon with the intent of making lunch for Bruce. It might come off as an attempt to woo Bruce, but maybe it’s not too late. 

He comes in wearing civilian clothes, his usual red flannel, jeans, and work boots, and of course, his glasses. He spent the morning with Bruce, and he left him to his favorite nurse for the time being. He can see through the walls that Bruce is currently enjoying a warm soak in the tub. He told Bruce he had some matters to attend to as an excuse to leave. He knows he doesn’t need an excuse to leave, but makes one anyway. 

“High Councilor,” the dietician and cook, both betas, who are making up a list of Bruce’s food for the next week, come down from the counter’s stool and gives Clark a salute. 

Clark waves a hand, signaling them to ease, and asks, “Do you have ingredients for apple pie on hand?” 

“I believe so, sir,” says the cook. 

“Good, bring them out,” says Clark. He stands by the steel counter, watching the two of them bring out the ingredients and the utensils to make it. 

Clark washes his hands, turns on the oven, and gets to work on the apples. He peels them with the peeler available, then chops them up into squares.   

The cook, stunned at the sight before him, gathers up the courage to ask, “Uh, do you need help, sir?” 

“No, thank you,” says Clark, grabbing the saucepot and turning on the heat to cook the apple filling. 

"Uh, sir," says the dietician before Clark can put the spices in the cooking apples. 

"Hm?" Clark looks at him. 

"Cinnamon makes Mr. Wayne sick," 

Clark sets the cinnamon down and proceeds to add in the nutmeg and allspice. He smiles when the room starts to smell of sugar, apples, and the spices, just like how his housed used to smell like when Ma made her apple pie. When he’s satisfied with how the filling tastes, he takes the saucepan off the heat and sets it aside. 

Both the cook and the dietician don’t know what to think about being an audience to Superman cooking. It’s a little unnerving to see him do something so domestic—measuring flour, salt, water, butter—it sends the creeps down their spine and it seems like their goosebumps won’t go away. Of course they know Superman played house with Batman—Mr. Wayne—but they haven’t actually seen him do that; only the nurses saw that. Seeing him do housework is a different thing. 

It’s like they’re seeing the past. The past where Superman didn’t rule the world. The past where he came home to an apartment, had a day job, probably did laundry on the weekends, and general cleaning every month. 

Their viewing doesn’t last long though. As Clark works on kneading the dough, he tells them to set out some chicken and baby potatoes. They put out two whole chickens from the freezer, and potatoes from the stockroom. 

Clark continues to knead the dough and lets the frozen chickens thaw. “Put out some baby carrots, too. And lemon and rosemary,” he says, laying out the dough into the pie plate. 

Clark assembles his pie, and pops it in the oven, then works on the chicken. His eyes turn red and the chickens thaw but doesn’t cook. He reaches for the cleaver and chops it into pieces. 

This time, Clark tells the cook what to do, and the dietician tells him what he’s allowed and not allowed to put in the food. Clark finds himself enjoying. He hopes Bruce will like what he will prepare for him. 

* * *

Bruce doesn’t entirely like nor hate that he takes much more pleasure when Clark is around. He still wishes that he didn’t like it. But he knows it’s because instinct is messing with his thoughts. He’s getting more and more attached to Clark as his due date grows nearer. He wants his touch. 

“Done?” asks his favorite nurse when he’s been in the water a considerable amount of time. The water’s lost its heat but isn’t cold. 

“I think so, yes,” answers Bruce. 

The nurse helps him out of the glass tub like Clark does, and a moment later, he’s in a fresh gown, and the nurse is blowdrying his hair. 

Another nurse comes in and sets down his mid morning snack on the dining table. It’s a slice of banana bread with a glass of orange juice. Bruce isn’t hungry but eats half of it. 

He resumes knitting a blanket. He’s done several already. He doesn’t know what else he can do to stay sane. He’s been knitting for a while when Clark comes back a little past noon. The bed dips with Clark’s weight as he moves to give Bruce a kiss on the cheek. 

“I made us lunch,” Clark smiles. 

“Really?” Bruce’s brows raise in surprise. “You did?” he doesn’t know why this makes him happy. 

Nurses come in and set the food down. 

“The apple pie doesn’t have cinnamon, so you can eat it,” Clark helps Bruce off the bed. 

On the table, Bruce sees the pie, and he can tell by the scent that there’s onion soup, baked chicken with sides of baked baby potatoes and carrots with some lemon butter. He loves it. He doesn’t know why but it brings a smile to his face and he loves it. 

“Go on, wash your hands,” 

Bruce walks over to the sink near the dining area. Clark turns to talk to the nurses to ask them to make some lemonade for them, and maybe thaw out some ice cream for the apple pie. 

“Clark,” 

“Oh my God!” shrieks the nurse. “Doctor! Get help!” he runs out of the room. 

Clark turns around and the sight of Bruce shatters his entire world. 

There’s blood. Too much blood. On the floor, on Bruce’s gown. On his shaking hands. 

“Clark...something’s wrong…” 


	9. 1 Day Old

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer I am not a medical student.
> 
> Semi beta'd. thank you @therapyfortravesty

The beeping of monitors has never been so loud. He can’t do anything but sit on the floor in the hallway outside of the operating room. There are dried blood smears on his face, on his flannel, even his jeans and boots, and crusty, dried blood under his nails.

Clark can’t stop asking himself why it happened. They’d been so careful. Always so careful. Everything was monitored. Bruce’s blood levels, the food he ate, the physical exercise he did, the baby’s growth...and Bruce’s mood was improving. He was smiling, he slept and looked better, he gained weight…

Everything was going well, so why?

Clark runs his hands through his hair, gripping it tightly with trembling hands.

He can’t do this. Not again.

His eyes widen when the heartbeat stops and there’s a long deafening beep. The baby’s a stillborn.

“No!” he cries, “Save her!” he yells at the door.

“Kal,” Diana grabs onto him, trying to prevent him from doing something stupid.

“Diana,” Clark reaches for her. “Diana, they have to save her,”

Diana can see the dread in his eyes. Eyes that were once bright and warm became cold, stoic, ruthless, and unforgiving after his great loss. The hope of a child somehow brought those warm eyes back, but if Clark again goes through this kind of grief, there might be anything of him left. “Trust that they are doing their best, Kal,”

Clark turns to the door. “SAVE HER!”

Diana understands. She understands why he’s begging for someone to save the child. She can feel his anger, directed at everything and nothing. But most of all she knows he’s angry because there is no one to blame for this.

They start trying to revive it.

The baby’s heart isn’t beating yet.

“Doctor, he’s losing too much blood,”

And Bruce’s is about to stop.

“Pulse and blood pressure are dropping!”

All he can do is cling onto Diana and scream in despair. And Diana, even though she resents both of them, can feel Clark’s pain and does nothing but hold him back, unable to imagine what it must be like to experience the same anguish of losing a child and mate all over again.

\--

They’re all a mess.

Everyone entering Bruce’s cell has to be dressed in sanitized scrubs, hair nets, and gloves. Bruce is stable and is still out from the sedatives administered in the operating room for the emergency caesarian. He’s pale but the cocktail of medicine coming in from his IV is making him look better than he did a few hours ago. He wouldn’t have known what he’d do if he lost Bruce.

Bruce’s favorite nurse, who comes in for a few moments to list down vitals on a clipboard, then adjusts the IV drip, is also a wreck. He’s the one who stayed with Bruce most. Clark tried to send him on a day off to gather himself, but he wouldn’t go and insisted he wants to be there when Bruce wakes up. He sets aside the clipboard and pen, removes the second pair of gloves he has on and throws them in a medical waste bin nearby, then lifts up Bruce’s gown to replace his bandages.

The nurse removes the gauze and reveals the horizontal incision that made it possible to retrieve their baby. It was red, bleeding a little, and the only thing that keeps the incision together to hold Bruce’s organs in are several staples. He works quickly to disinfect the area, and then a little later, Bruce has fresh bandages on, his gown is pulled back down, and the nurse leaves.

And then there’s a little whine from behind Clark.

The baby.

Clark is both pained and overwhelmed with joy when he sees all three and a half pounds of her. He’s pained because she’s not supposed to be trying too hard to live yet. She’s supposed to be still inside Bruce, safe, warm, doing nothing but grow. But he’s also so happy both she and Bruce are alive and recovering, that he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

She’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, even though she’s small and her skin is a little too reddish. She has all ten fingers and toes, with wisps of black hair on her tiny head. Her hand isn’t even big enough to wrap around Clark’s finger. When he felt her grip onto his gloved finger for the first time, he couldn’t help but burst into tears because she’s _alive_. So, so _alive_. To him, the life in her represents the brilliant and blinding light of the sun, and the very hope that their crest represents.

The doctor tells him she has a little trouble breathing, but that’s okay because she’ll get better. Clark believes him because her heartbeat is a loud, fast drum, hammering away in her tiny chest, and he wants to hear nothing more than for her to cry as loudly as she can, for her to open her eyes and see him and Bruce.

But for now, she’s sleeping in her incubator near Bruce’s bed, both of them stuck with wires monitoring their vitals. He’s relieved, thankful and grateful, and happy to hear all of this constant beeping.

He holds Bruce’s IV free hand, pressing kisses on the dry skin, quietly pleading Bruce to wake up because their baby is safe and alive, that she’s wearing one of the pairs of gloves and booties, and a bonnet he’s knitted. That she looks perfect, and with the help of their doctors, will continue to blossom into a healthy child.

From peripheral vision, Clark sees a figure from the other side of the glass wall. He looks up and sees Damian, dressed down in some muscle shirt and sweatpants, hair up in a messy ponytail. He doesn’t have the energy or will to turn Damian away.

A nurse comes up to Damian and asks him if he wants to go inside, but Damian shakes his head. Damian doesn’t look at Clark, but at Bruce, then at the incubator.


	10. Some Days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i tried.

 

Bruce doesn’t wake up immediately. It worries Clark but he knows it’s normal, that it’s the effect of the drugs. Bruce drifts in and out of consciousness, opening his eyes every few hours, mumbling something incoherent, and all Clark does is let him drink a little water, and shushes him back to sleep.

The cell now looks like both full-fledged ICU and a NICU. Clark hates it. He’s seen this too many times on Bruce before, but that doesn’t mean he’s gotten used to it. He’d never get used to it. Especially to see so many wires attached to his own child, helping her breathe, helping her _live_ … Clark’s never felt so helpless.

He hates not being able to do _anything_ for the both of them.

When Bruce wakes up, the first thing he notices is the beeping. A lot of loud beeping. His vision doesn’t sharpen out as fast as he wants it to. The room is dimly lit and that doesn’t give him an idea of what time it is. He turns his head slowly to the side, and he sees a blurry outline of Clark sleeping on a chair. He looks up a little and sees his IV on a pole hanging above his head. His surroundings start to clear out, then he sees Clark brightening the lights in the room a few notches.

“Bruce,” Clark says, finally relieved, like someone plucked a thorn from his heart.

Bruce’s eyesight clears. “Clark,” he rasps. He feels terrible as he catches up with the pain that his body is experiencing.

Clark shushes him. “Don’t force yourself,”

That’s when he remembers all the blood. His eyes widen and he starts to panic. “Clark,” his voice still comes out hoarse. “Clark, I’m sorry,” he tries to get up, but searing pain cuts through his abdomen and that elicits a strangled groan out of him.

“Bruce, calm down,” Clark says as he tries to gently push Bruce back onto the bed. But Bruce claws at his forearms, trying to pull Clark down with him.

“Please,” Bruce tries to speak louder. “Please, please, I’m sorry,”

“Shhh,” Clark lets Bruce cling onto him.

“I didn’t mean to, I swear,” Bruce doesn’t know why he’s pleading, crying, _begging_ , for Clark to say something else. If the child is dead then Clark is free to kill him like he said he would. That’s what he wanted, right? “I didn’t want to hurt the baby. Please believe me. I’m sorry,”

“Bruce, it’s alright, it’s okay,” Clark thumbs a tear away from Bruce’s cheek. “It’s okay,” he says again. “She’s okay, look,” Clark gestures to their far right, and Bruce sees the incubator housing a baby strapped with wires, too small and too reddish to look healthy.

“Baby,”

“Yes, our baby,” Clark brings Bruce’s hand to his lips. “She’s so beautiful, Bruce, but we can’t hold her yet,”

Bruce doesn’t know if he wants to hold her.  

“I named her Lara,”

Bruce turns back to Clark when he hears her name. He realizes after all that time, he hadn’t thought of a name for her.

* * *

 

It takes three days for Bruce’s milk to come in. When it does, he doesn’t make much of it. The doctor says it’s normal and maybe it will take a little bit more time, but he hopes it will be soon. The colostrum is important and Lara should get as much as she can of it.

In those three days, he also hasn’t gotten enough courage to touch Lara, even through the gloves on the side of the incubator. He’s not entirely sure why he’s so afraid of touching her. Maybe it’s because he thinks he’ll hurt her more than he already has. He couldn’t even carry her to term, so being out of him in this unforgiving world…he’s sure he’ll do something wrong.

When his milk production doesn’t improve a week after his caesarian, the doctor tells Clark he’ll prescribe medication that will help improve his milk flow. He also tells Clark that Bruce is experiencing postpartum blues, which explains his restlessness and why he’s detached from the baby. Sometimes Bruce has trouble sleeping, and sometimes Bruce sleeps more than necessary. The doctor also warns him that if Bruce doesn’t recover from the blues, it can lead to depression. Clark hopes it doesn’t come to that, so he tries to be around Bruce more. He rarely leaves the cell anymore. Diana comes and goes, usually during the morning, then checking in on them in the evening before retiring herself.

Most of the time, Bruce is just staring at her, and when he’s not, he tries to avoid looking at her altogether. Her eyes are open now. They’re Clark’s eyes. The doctor wraps her in a warm towel, and instructs Clark to give her skin to skin contact for a while every day. Clark doesn’t give Bruce a chance to say something, and he sets the baby down on him. She’s still so small, but her breathing is better. She seems to appreciate the warmth Bruce is giving her. Bruce feels a little shitty that he can’t make enough milk for her.

Clark is the one taking care of him now. The nurses only come in when there’s something Clark doesn’t know how to do. They’re usually there supervising Clark when he’s changing Bruce’s dressings. It’s Clark who brings him his food, helps him bathe, shower, and dress. There are times when he loses his appetite, and times when he eats more than usual. Clark liked it when Bruce ate more, so he tries to.

Bruce also tries to get back into reading and knitting, but he loses interest in them altogether and he’s left with barely started books and blankets. But he likes seeing Lara wear the gloves and socks he’s knitted. He’s relieved to know that he’s doing something right.

Over the next few weeks, Bruce’s milk production and sleep has progress. The medication he’s taking now lets him make more milk than Lara needs. He feels a little better that whenever the nurse comes around to pump the milk from him, there is significantly more than the abysmal amount he used to make. The extra is stored for a later date, and the nurse comes in at specific hours of the day to relieve him of his engorged chest.

But this little improvement doesn’t keep him from being angry. Angry at nothing and everything. Angry at himself, mostly. Angry at the doctor for no reason, not letting him examine him because he doesn’t want to checked over or touched. Because he doesn’t want to hear anything about how he’s not doing anything right. Because when he looks at his poor little girl, all he can see is his failure. All their lives, society tells them, tells _him_ and everyone just like him, that an omega is made for having children. They’re made to nurture them, love them, raise them, and everything comes naturally to them. Bruce is angry that the instinct to nurture and love doesn’t come naturally to him this time for the child he carried. He’s angry that the body given to him, made to carry and nourish children, can’t even carry one to term, can’t even make enough milk. Can’t do the very things it’s supposed to do.  

It makes him angry that this instinct to nurture and love didn’t come to him for Damian. It makes him angry that he wasn’t careful enough when he decided to visit Dick. If he fought harder, had more resolve, if he tried to _fall out of love_ , he wouldn’t have let Clark had his way with him. If he were more careful, if he’d considered his cycle, he wouldn’t have gotten pregnant. If he’d been more careful, this little girl wouldn’t have had to struggle to breathe.

All the anger is exhausting, and he doesn’t want to be angry anymore but he is. His anger makes him avoid Clark even though it’s difficult to when he’s confined in a room with four walls and wide windows. The anger makes his incision prickle. He’s not sure why. But he is glad that Clark respects the space he wants.

Clark tells him he should hold Lara more because she needs the contact. He can tell Bruce is always reluctant to hold her. He’s always staring but never reaches to touch her. Bruce hasn’t kissed her once compared to the hundreds Clark has already given her. Bruce has barely even said hi to her. He knows why he’s like this and he’s trying to help by being there for him, but when someone is as stubborn as Bruce, it can be a little difficult, especially when the doctor says he’s not supposed to push him. It makes his heart fall when Bruce refuses to hold her.

The doctor sits next to him one day. Bruce doesn’t want to listen, but he listens anyway. He knows Clark put the doctor up to this, since he’s not around. He says Lara can sleep in a crib now instead of an incubator, in just a few days. He doesn’t mention, however, that the reason why she’s improving so fast is the skin to skin contact Clark is giving her. Bruce doesn’t always agree to the kangaroo care, and lets Clark have all the hours with her because it’s Clark who wanted her. It’s Clark who wants her.

Bruce wishes he wanted her too.

The doctor says something about how he needs therapy. He doesn’t listen.

He grimaces as he gets to his feet, pain piercing through his abdomen from his incision, then takes a few steps toward the incubator, and stares at the sleeping child. Lara’s grown so much, from the small, reddish, and sickly newborn; she’s now a lot more filled out, pink, with an adorable button nose, chubby cheeks, and a head of shiny black hair. She’s wearing another pair of the gloves and socks he’s knitted. That makes him smile a little. Dick would probably have liked a little sister. Dick would’ve been the one telling him how to do things.

It’s the sight of her growing and getting better that makes Bruce decide to pull himself together. In the next few weeks, after Lara is moved out of her incubator into a crib, Bruce tries to eat more, sleep more and around Lara’s schedule. He doesn’t anymore try to throw away the vitamins he’s given and stays hydrated. He tries to physically stay closer to Clark, and tries to hold Lara longer.

When Clark sees Bruce attempt to feed Lara from his breast for the first time, it makes him fall in love with him all over again. In time, he can bring Bruce to earth and have his dream life with him there. He wants to raise Lara where she can play under the sun and in wide open fields where she experiment with her powers should she develop them. He wants them to stay in a decent, quiet home, where Clark can cultivate a field, grow crops, and maybe even teach Lara a little of it. He has to keep both of them safe as possible, so he won’t give up leading the One Earth Government. There will be no more insane mass murderers killing mothers, children, and fathers anymore.

Lara is an angel. She cries when she needs something, and hushes down when the needs are met. Clark likes watching her sleep, especially now without the wires and tubes to help her. Now that Bruce has gotten a good look at her, sometimes he finds himself unable to put her down, even though his incision is aching and his arm is numbing. Lara likes him, too. She likes meeting Bruce’s stormy blue eyes with her own bright blue ones, just like Clark’s.

His state take a deep dive when Damian comes to visit after a long while. Damian does nothing but stand on the other side of the glass and watch him. One moment, he’s putting socks on Lara, and the next there are tears falling, wetting the knitted socks. He’s not sure why Damian’s presence and words are affecting him now. Damian visits more often now. He wants to retreat to somewhere he can gather his thoughts and calm down, but there is nowhere to go.

Lara stares up at him unable to understand, but she smiles at him. Bright, happy, and toothless. That makes Bruce laugh a little wetly as he runs a gentle finger over her smooth, round cheek.

“You deserve more,” he tells her. “So much more, Lara. My beautiful Lara,”

He picks her up then lays her back down on her crib, where the mobile above her entertains her for a while. He sits back down on the bed, blankly looking across the room, again leaving another partly started knitted blanket on the bed.

Like his first few weeks of confinement, Bruce starts wondering how angry he could make Clark. He wants to anger him enough to quickly finish him off. The only way he can make Clark angry enough to kill him was if something happened to Lara. He’d never. If he does something that would end up hurting Lara more than he already has, he’d take his own life himself given the right situation and chance.

Clark sees Bruce suddenly worsen and he’s not sure what else he can do. His milk production declines, and his fear of holding the baby returns. He doesn’t tell anybody all the thoughts plaguing him. The doctors and nurses tell him therapy might help, but he doesn’t want to say anything. He’d _never_ say anything. Not while Clark can hear everything. Clark should never hear _anything_. Clark should _never_ find out anything.

About how Bruce feels terribly inadequate when he sees Clark enthusiastically do more than he does. When he bathes, and dries her, when he changes her diapers, when he feeds her and burps her, when he easily can make her shush when she’s crying, when he can effortlessly make her smile and laugh. About how Lara doesn’t deserve a mother like _him_.

A nurse always hovers close by when Clark has to go for an emergency. Today it’s his favorite who’s looking over the both of them while Clark is away.

Bruce sees Damian from his peripheral vision, standing behind the glass wall.

“HEY!” Damian yells as he hits the glass with enough force that it upsets Lara. “Take care of her yourself, you jackass!”

Bruce has heard all of this before but he doesn’t want to hear any of this since it hurts more now than it did back then. He closes his eyes and tries to drown Damian out.

“You’re useless!” Damian kicks at the glass as the nurses try to pull him back. “You couldn’t take care of me because I wasn’t a baby when I was dropped on your lap, and now you have one you made yourself, and you couldn’t be fucking bothered to take care of her either! How far are you willing to fuck up your own children just so you can prove how much you know you never wanted them? Just how much you fail as their parent!”

Dick. He wanted Dick. He’d always want his little boy. His perfect, handsome, sweet, little boy.

“You’re full of shit, Bruce! I hate you! And I hope she grows up hating you, too!”

He can still hear Damian yelling. Lara is now crying, and the nurse can’t calm her down. Clark’s back and he too is yelling, getting into a heated argument with Damian. There’s so much yelling. Yelling, and Lara crying, and Bruce doesn’t know what to do.

He doesn’t notice Clark come in. He gently takes Lara from the nurse and she immediately calms down. She’s laid back down in her crib, and Clark tries to knock some sense back into Bruce, who looks blankly at him.

“She has your eyes,” Bruce says to Clark.

“Bruce, you have to let the doctor help you,”

Bruce lifts a hand to reach for Clark’s handsome but worried face. “Just like your eyes,”

It takes some time for Bruce to snap out of it. It’s Lara’s laughter that pulls Bruce out of his seemingly endless stupor. He looks over to the crib, where Clark is entertaining Lara with her rattle and her mobile.

Clark brings Lara over to him. “Lara’s happy to see you, Bruce,”

Bruce accepts when Clark hands Lara over to him. He doesn’t give it much thought and presses his lips to Lara’s temple.

At six months and two weeks, Lara receives her first kiss from Bruce. Then he looks up at Clark and asks for help. “Because Lara deserves better,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i really did


	11. 7 months

Clark absolutely loves being a dad. Bruce can see it in the way he holds, talks, touches, and takes care of Lara. The way he instantly lights up when he gets to see her at the end of a long day. In the way all the stresses of a world ruler melt away when she laughs at him for no reason. 

Lara is everything Clark wanted in life. 

He wanted her so badly he enslaved an entire planet for taking her from him the first time. Bruce can’t stop wondering if Clark would have done worse to him if had actually lost her. Clark probably wouldn’t have kept him prisoner. After all, what would a powerful, virile alpha like Clark do with an omega who can’t even do what it was born to do? Might as well just kill him off. 

Lara speaks her first word when Bruce is dressing her up one morning after her bath. He’s securing the diaper on and putting a cute yellow dress on her. 

She giggles at him and the innocent laugh makes Bruce smile and heart feel arm. She’s just been fed from a bottle he’d pumped from him last night so she’s full, happy, and almost sleepy. Bruce admits to himself that he feels good because she feels good. He wonders if this is what Clark feels all the time when he holds her. Like a comforting warmth, a light feeling that overcomes any anxiety that lingers. A feeling that everything will be alright. 

Lara giggled once more and reaches up for him. 

“Dada!” 

Bruce freezes. “Lara, you…” 

“Dada!” she says again. 

“You’re talking,” whispers Bruce in awe. “And you’re looking for your Pa, huh?” 

It makes sense that she’d look for Clark first. 

Bruce brings Lara’s tiny hand to his lips. “Your Papa will be back soon. He’ll be here before you know it and you can say his name all you want. He’ll be so happy to hear you calling for him,” 

“Dada!” 

“Soon,” Bruce gives her a small smile as he plays with her. 

Lara calls for Clark the entire day. His incision prickles like needles throughout the day, too. He doesn’t take any medication for the pain since he’s not sure if that will have any effect on his milk and he doesn’t want Lara to drink drugged milk. Clark would flip his shit if he found out he’s more drugged than he already is, granted, his medication is safe for breastfeeding omegas. He’s given some shots to delay his heat though, to keep him from injuring himself and from tearing his incision open. 

Lara’s taking her nap when he starts feeling his chest ache. He ignores it for a while and starts to read some books, but it doesn’t take long and he’s starting to leak. 

He groans when his top, now a version of scrubs the nurses wear, rubs against the skin of his chest. He fetches the pump from the dresser that contains all of Lara’s belongings. His favorite nurse, the one who reminds him of Dick, comes in and helps him set up the pump. The nurse rolls a table over to the bed and sets the pump down on it, then gives a hand to Bruce to attach it to him. Bruce inhales sharply when the nurse accidentally brushes a finger over the tender breast as he attaches the pump.

“Sorry,” says the nurse, wincing. “Can I turn it on now?” 

Bruce nods and the nurse flips the switch. There is both relief and discomfort. Bruce doesn’t like pumping, but relieves him of his engorgement faster compared to breastfeeding. 

He’s making more milk now than ever. The nurse thinks his mood contributes to his production together with the medication he’s taking. 

When they’re done, Bruce quickly covers up and lets the nurse clean up and store the expressed milk in the small refrigerator Clark allowed to be put in his cell. It is specifically for the milk storage, but Bruce could see it as storage for baby food too, should the nurses not be the ones responsible for Lara’s diet as well. But he doubts that. Clark would insist that the doctors know best.

Diana comes visit him later in the afternoon. Lara’s just had her bottle and he’s just finished changing her diaper. She giggles at him, giving him gummy smiles, meeting Bruce’s eyes with her own bright blue ones, just like Clark’s. 

“How can you look at a child you were forced to have?” Diana asks, standing behind the glass wall. “Much less hold and care for,” 

Bruce doesn’t look at her as he adjusts Lara’s tiny socks on her feet. “It’s not her fault,” he says, running a finger over her soft, pink, chubby cheek. “She is as much a prisoner as I. I have no one else but her,” 

Lara puts her hand in her mouth, and Bruce pries it away. Diana always knew Bruce liked children, but she can’t understand how he can stomach something that was a result of an assault on him. Bruce answers, as if he can hear Diana loudly thinking. 

“Maybe when a child looks at you as if you were everything, you’ll understand,” 

Lara giggles. Bruce now finds himself looking forward those pure, innocent giggles.

“Damian looked at you like that,” 

Bruce tenses. “If he did, he wouldn’t have killed _my_ everything,” 

Diana doesn’t say anything and the only sound that fills the cell is Lara’s gurgling. 

“I’d rather not talk about this,” he says before Diana can say something else. “I won’t be able to feed Lara properly if we do,”

Diana leaves without another word, and Bruce kills time with Lara by reading to her the children’s books Clark brought to them. It’s halfway through a small collection of Hans Christian Andersen stories when Clark enters the cell, dressed down in plaid and worn jeans. 

“Hey,” Clark greets him with a smile and a kiss to his temple, then sits down beside him and turns to Lara who’s giggling excitedly at him. 

“She was looking for you today,” Bruce tells Clark as he lifts Lara off the bed. 

“She was?” 

Lara squealed. “Dada!”

Bruce wishes he had the same reaction as Clark. He held her close, laughing heartily, and peppering her with kisses, looking like he’d never been so proud. 

“You can talk!” exclaimed Clark, “Our little princess can talk!”  

* * *

Diana lands on the grounds with no sound. The house is rotting. Vines have crawled on and through the cracked, moss covered façade. The columns look as if they were on their last legs, and the dirt that collected on the gargoyles make them look more menacing than they already do. The fountain at the font has dried up, leaving cracks in the stone and crumbling dried moss at the bottom. She entered the abandoned manor, walking through its dark, cold halls until she found the master bedroom. 

The sight of the bed sickens her. This is where Kal forced Bruce. This is where Kal slept with Bruce when he was away from Lois. This is where both of them committed sin. Against Lois. Against her. She wants to destroy it, but doesn’t. 

The white sheet covering it lay on a heap on the floor, its pillows scattered around the mattress, and the comforter and blankets are ruffled and kicked to one side. Everything is stained yellow, telling of the years it went uncared for. 

* * *

“What were you doing at Wayne Manor?” Kal asks right as she appears on the beaming platform. 

“I wanted a look around the scene of the crime,” she says, walking past him. 

It’s past midnight and they should all be asleep. The only ones who should be awake are those on their shift. 

“Why do you keep insisting—” Kal grabs her arm, and Diana’s fist, without a moment’s hesitation, collides with his jaw. 

“Don’t you _dare_ touch me,” she growls at him. “I am not insisting that you raped him in his own home. I’m stating it as fact!” 

Kal holds his stinging jawline as he recovers from the punch. 

“Did you honestly think that Bruce, of all people, would welcome you back with open arms after you declared him an enemy? A non-person? After freezing his assets? Even after everything two you have shared? Joy, pain, _intimacy_?” 

“Are you now pitying him?” 

“No!” Diana yells. Every personnel on shift retreats to hide behind desks, columns, wherever they cannot be seen. And they can hear everything. “I understand his situation, but also despise both of you enough to desire your blood on my sword and redeem my tainted honor. You mock and besmirch everything I have done to help your cause. You were unfaithful to _me_! You _betrayed_ me, and now am reduced to nothing compared to your whore!” 

“He is _not_ a whore!” Kal grinds out. 

“No, he is not. You just made him one when you decided to turn to him when Lois and I weren’t enough for you,” she says, “The child you keep prisoner has no fault and is the only reason Bruce is still alive. You best hope I don’t lose my temper, Kal, or your daughter will be motherless,” 


	12. 18 months

Bruce clenches around Clark’s knot, panting heavily, shaking as waves of his orgasm rolls through him. “Clark,” he wheezes, leaning back on Clark’s chest.

“Good, Bruce?” Clark asks, kissing his neck and shoulder, one hand kneading a full, tender breast and the other tracing the surgical scar below Bruce’s navel.

Bruce gives a low, guttural grunt as he grabs a fistful of the sheets. He’s never had such a fulfilling heat before. He’s never spent his heat with anyone before, even back then when he occasionally slept with Clark, he never spent a heat with him. This is his first heat with Clark.

A week ago, they stopped giving him the medication used to keep his heat at bay. The doctors said he’s already physically capable of taking it. He just wasn’t sure if he was emotionally and mentally ready for it. He felt it catch up with him immediately.

The waves of his heat aren’t as intense as they were a few days ago. He can feel it that it’s about to end, but that doesn’t mean his sensitivity will level out. For now, he will just have to stay knotted to Clark for the next half hour.

And for now, he won’t be able to do anything about how he smells like. He smells like he wants Clark. Not just as someone to help him through his heat, but as a mate. He’s always wanted Clark. He just couldn’t have him. Now, he can have him, like he’s always wanted, but he knows he shouldn’t.

He shouldn’t—

“Hnngg!” his body wracks through another orgasm as Clark grinds himself in him.

And then Bruce finds himself screaming as his limbs flail, trying to find a way to remove whatever was causing the fiery pain in his neck. It spreads from his neck to the back of his head, down to his chest, sending needles to the tips of his fingers and toes. It stops as soon as it starts, and his hand pulls on Clark’s hair. Bruce is much too out of it, feeling much too good from the knot, to care about how Clark’s licking his neck as he passes out.

* * *

When he wakes up, he doesn’t anymore feel like he’s on fire. He still feels prickling heat on the tip of his toes and fingers, and his aching body, but that’s alright. It means it’s over.

He sits up and sees he’s back in his usual scrubs. He turns to the crib by the bed, then feels something taped to his neck.

It dawns on him the horror of what Clark had just done. His hands shake and he feels the heat drain from his extremities and it’s replaced with stinging ice.

“You’re awake,”

Bruce sees Clark come in with a nurse behind him holding a tray of food. The nurse sets the tray down on the bed.

 _Mate_ , his body tells him,  _this is my mate_. But Bruce gets off the bed and steps back, away from Clark and the nurse.

“You bit me,” Bruce says as he pulls the bandages off his neck.

The pull of the tape from his skin itches and burns but he pulls it off anyway. He sees the blood on the gauze in the shape of a bite. The sight of it makes him dizzy. He sways on his feet but Clark catches him before he hits the floor.

“You bit me,” he exhales sharply, pushing Clark away. “Why did you bite me?”

Clark carries him back to the bed. “I only wanted to make you mine, Bruce,”

The nurse rushes out of the room to retrieve more bandages.

“Yours?” Bruce feels the bed under him and he tries to get away from Clark, but Clark holds him still. He wants to throw up. His eyesight can’t focus and he feels like he’s drowning.

“Bruce, Bruce, stay with me,” Clark says, “Look at me and breathe slowly. It’s alright, it’s alright, I’m here,”

Bruce does as he’s told. He breathes, and breathes, and lets it pass. The dizziness doesn’t go away as fast, but his breathing does even out. “But you bit me,”

Clark helps him sit up and hands him a glass of water. Bruce takes a small sip, shakes his head, and turns away from the water, feeling like he’ll throw it up if he drank more. Clark sets the glass back down on the tray, and keeps Bruce in his arms in an attempt to comfort him and to calm him down.

“Isn’t that what you wanted, Bruce?” Clark kisses his hair. “For me to be yours, and for you to be mine? We’ve wanted this for so long, Bruce, and now we belong to each other. We’re mated,”

It had been what he wanted for the longest time. To be loved by him enough to commit to him like he did with Lois when he bit and married her. Like he did with Diana when he decided to rule with her by his side. “You didn’t ask me,” says Bruce evenly.

“Should I have?” Clark guides Bruce’s head to lean on his shoulder. “You already smelled so open, smelled like you wanted me,”

“It’s not the same,” Bruce whispers.

Clark grabs his face and forces Bruce to look at him. It’s a face Bruce hadn’t seen since Lara’s birth. An expression that brings together Clark’s brows and makes his wrinkles more pronounced, making him look older and angrier than he probably is.

“You are  _mine_ , Bruce. Whether or not you still want to be. You are  _my_  mate, and Lara is our daughter,” he leans in and licks the fresh bite on Bruce’s neck. “And this bite proves it,” he whispers in his ear before letting him go.

His favorite nurse comes in with more bandages, and he stands frozen there as he watches Clark be physically rough with Bruce for the first time.

“Bandage his neck and make him finish his food,” says Clark before turning to leave. “I’ll be back before supper,”

“Y-yes,” he rushes to Bruce’s side and starts disinfecting the wound.

Bruce doesn’t say a word for the rest of the day, not even to Lara.

* * *

Clark’s reading through some reports when Hal’s call patches through. “What is it?”

“We’ve captured Batman,” says Hal.

Clark holds the connection.

“Impossible,”

Hal can’t possibly have Batman in custody. Clark has Bruce confined in the Watchtower for the last two years.

He resumes the call. “Where are you holding him?”

“Stryker’s Island,”

* * *

Clark doesn’t believe his eyes when he sees him. Hal did capture Batman. It somewhat pains him to see the image of his mate battered and bruised. He approaches the doppelganger and lifts his chin to take a good look at him.

This Batman has an eye swollen shut, bruised cheek, and a split lip. He scans him and he’s mostly fine, and no broken bones except that he’s having difficulty breathing from exhaustion and the beating. He’d never want to see his own Bruce like this.

“This is a duplicate,” says Clark, letting go of Batman’s chin. “Who beat him?”

Hal smirks and crosses his arms. “I did,” he answers. “Tried to beat answers out of him, but nothing he said made any sense,”

The Yellow Lantern suddenly finds himself flying to the wall behind them, cracking the concrete, and falling to the floor. “I told you not to touch Batman if you captured him,”

Hawkgirl stays silent.

“Take him to Stryker’s Island,” Clark turns to leave the cell. “There’s sure to be more of these…duplicates. We’ll draw out the rest of them by executing this one,”

* * *

Clark enters the cell and finds Bruce laying Lara down to sleep. It’s late, and he only finished work ten minutes ago. He missed supper even though he told them he’d be back early enough to join Bruce. Setting up that duplicate Batman’s execution took longer than he would have liked.

He’s barefoot and in a pair of comfortable sweats. He didn’t bother putting on a shirt. He pulls Bruce into am embrace from behind and watches Lara sleep from over his shoulder, then kisses the bandages covering the bite mark.

“I’m sorry I was rough with you this morning,” he presses his nose into Bruce’s hair. “I didn’t mean to do it,”

Clark brings Bruce to the bed.

Clark might or might not have meant to do it, but Bruce knew he did it because he isn’t used to not getting his way anymore.

“You didn’t ask,” whispers Bruce.

“I didn’t want to hear you say no,” Clark admits. “Would you have said no?”

He would have. He could have tried to summon all of the will to get away even with the heat. He would have tried to punch, kick, and scream his way out of Clark’s grip.

“No,” Bruce says instead as he shakes his head, because some part of him is still glad he is Clark’s and Clark is his now, and not Lois’ or Diana’s.

Clark is  _his_. Just like how he wanted him to be back when all they could do was meet in up in the penthouse after a gala, or lying to Lois about helping Bruce out on a case, or accompanying him on stakeout.

But also, Clark  _owns_  him now. He is also  _not_  a mate, not completely. He is a prisoner, kept in a station space so there is nowhere for him to go, in a cell where everything is watched and measured. He is kept prisoner to ensure he gave birth to a healthy child, to ensure his participation in raising her. Mates take care of each other, work together,  _love_  each other. He loves Clark. He’s just not sure if he should be loving this Clark.

Clark leans over to him and kisses the other side of his neck. Bruce gasps, chokes on his breath as Clark starts to grind on him, triggering what’s left of his heat.

“You’re mine,” Clark growls, ripping his top open.

Clark’s scent is intoxicating. He hadn’t realized it before, but the scent wants to bite Clark too, not that it would matter. Clark smells like soap and rubble. He doesn’t notice that he’s scratching at Clark’s back. There is a rip, and he feels the cool air on his legs. Clark pushes into him, and Bruce bites Clark’s shoulder.

* * *

The door swishes open and Lex sees Diana saunter into the room. She looks as if she’s inspecting the office, full of laid out blueprints, open books, weapon prototypes, and a bar of food and drink.

“To what do I owe this pleasure, Wonder Woman?” Lex offers Diana a glass of wine.

Diana takes the glass and downs it in one go. “I want to take the same offer you made Deathstroke,”

Lex’s eyes widen. Diana saw that he met with Deathstroke? Why didn’t she inform Superman about his betrayal? “Why? After all this time, why now?”

Diana sets the glass down on the table. “I want to see how far my spite can take me,”


	13. The Night Before

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place the day the duplicate Batman is captured by Hal and Shayera.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks BatShitCrazy for going through some of this! And also therapyfortravesty ♥

Diana has her coffee right after she gets up. She doesn’t bother having meals with Bruce, not anymore. She stopped when Kal’s actually showed interest in joining Bruce in his imprisonment. Most of the time, she visits before they wake up, when the cell is dimly lit, and when she can see Kal’s body snuggled as close as possible to Bruce.

She gets the coffee maker running, and turns on her computer, which flashes a dashboard of condensed news from the entire globe, her schedule and itinerary, and a collage of cameras from all over the tower. She peruses the screen and its contents and it doesn’t seem like her immediate attention is needed anywhere in the world, so she returns to her coffee and pours herself a mug.

She finishes it before taking a long, hot shower. When she’s dressed, she fastens her lasso and sword to her hips, and heads over to the monitor womb to check up on who’s on duty. The bridge his busy, but also filled with hushed voices of staff talking. She decides she’s done hovering over the screens, sets down papers that need her attention, and leaves the bridge and decides to see how things are going on in Bruce’s cell.

The room is now brightly lit, and nurses are setting up breakfast. Kal is helping Bruce with the pump while another nurse changes Lara’s diaper. All three of them look like they’re fresh out of the shower, and Diana wants to punch the glass in front of her. She doesn’t.

She can’t stand the sight of how domestic everything looks, then leaves to assign someone else to watch over what she should be attending to. She sends Barry. None of them know they’ve had Bruce locked up here in the Tower with them.

She goes to see Lex that night after she asked to join his cause.

“Everything going according to plan?” she says as soon as the door closes. Lex’s room is one of the very few rooms in the Watchtower with no cameras and bugs recording anything. “The duplicate Batman was captured earlier today. He will be executed tomorrow morning,”

Lex nods and hands her a few sheets of paper. The content of the paper isn’t related to their discussion. “You’ll have no physical part in the infiltration since you’ve already given them all the access codes they need, and you’ll do however you please to let Superman believe you’re still on his side,”

“And the staff?”

“Just to be sure, they’ll all be evacuated to the satellite offices available to house to them. Bruce and Lara will be put in a holding cell in the Metrotower, much like the one he’s in now. Once he sees they’re safe, it might calm him down enough for us to regroup. That can buy us time for you to continue leading him on, and for us to get the other Batman to safety, and ask their Superman for help,”

Diana returns the document to him. “Clear enough,” she replies, “I will also be gathering my army should he ask for it,”

“However,” says Lex, depositing the documents onto a pile he will later peruse. “You’ll have to be willing to hand over command to the duplicate Wonder Woman should it be necessary,”  

Diana’s jaw tightens, but concedes with a nod. “Of course,”

“Good, good,” Lex nods. “However, you do know that Bruce won’t be safe from those seeking justice. He will be treated as an accomplice should he withhold information from the authorities. He’ll be compelled to stay silent. Clark is his mate after all,”

“Good. So both of them can rot in prison, if the people of earth can forgive them enough to let them live,”

“Careful, Diana, you and I are one of them,” says Lex slowly. “This uprising may grant us leniency, but not acquittal,”

Diana scoffs and leaves the room.

* * *

 

Lara is 18 months and a few days old, but still feeds from Bruce. They’re still weaning her from breastmilk to formula and to different kinds of baby food for quite some time now. She still prefers the breastmilk though she does like apples, and Bruce is glad to see improvement in the weaning. She eats more solid food now, feed less from Bruce’s breast, and more from her bottles, though she does try to suck on Bruce through his top (it makes Bruce laugh).

Lara’s almost done having her breakfast of mashed bananas with a little formula when she notices the heavy atmosphere. She looks up at Bruce, who’s looks worse than Lara is used to seeing. She frowns at him and reaches for him from her high chair.

“Ma!”

She brings a small smile to Bruce’s face.

Bruce plucks her from the high chair and lets her stand on his lap. She leans over and inhales his scent, then presses her hands to his cheeks and gives him a smile, before bursting into a giggle.

She calls for him over and over again, giggling when kissed, rubbing herself all over him, trying her best to stick as close as possible to him.

Bruce wonders how such a sweet thing could possibly be raised by Clark. He’d seen the horrors Clark had done. But she’s so sweet and beautiful. And knows when he felt down. Like right now, she’s trying to cheer him up by calling his name, babbling at him like she has so much to say but most of it is jargon. Bruce loves her chattiness.

He gets up and sets her down on her playmat, where were toys are scattered everywhere. Most of it are educational. Clark doesn’t want anything that isn’t educational. It has to be fun, but she also has to learn something from it.

“No!” she says when she’s put down. “Want mama!” she crawls back to him.

Bruce can’t do anything but let her place herself on his lap and babble away.

“Mama!”

Bruce had always wanted this with Clark. To share a life, a bed, and have a child with him. Children, if they were blessed enough. He just hadn’t realized it had to get so bad before he could achieve this once impossible dream. What he and Clark have isn’t ideal, what Clark did to him was wrong, but they still have it. And it’s not like he hadn’t done things with Clark that led to this. He isn’t proud of what he did, but some part of him is glad he gets to have this.

The first time around, Clark chose Lois. Of course he chose her. It wasn’t a surprise to him but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt, even if he didn’t have the right to be. So he slept with him when he dated her. He let Clark fuck him at the Daily Planet. He slept with him the night before his wedding day. He slept with him during his months honeymoon. He slept with him the days before they found out Lois was pregnant. Thus, there is no doubt in Bruce’s mind that he deserved all this suffering. But it probably shouldn’t be called suffering if he wanted some part of it.

He runs a light hand over the bandaged bite on his neck. He’d wanted and dreamed of this bite ever since the first time he slept with Clark. It’s a never-ending battle of and dreams and wrongdoings.

He wanted this. He wanted a life with Clark. He wanted a child with him. He wanted, still wants, to be loved by him.

But all of it was given to him by force.

“Mama?”  Lara reaches for his face with her pudgy hands and he smiles at her.

And he’s not sure if this is any way to be loved at all. Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. It isn’t his and Clark’s love that conquered the obstacles that prevented them from becoming one, but rather, it is Clark’s love (if you could call it that) that conquered him. It is his desperation and obsession with control and achieving what he wanted for humanity, and with him.

Bruce wasn’t unaware of Clark’s dreams. He shared with Bruce his dreams of a large house, full of children, on a farm where he could work and harvest their crops under the sun. Sprawling property with fields to play in with his children, where they could lay on the grass and watch the stars. A kitchen where they’d cook their harvest, a table where they could eat their supper, and a bedroom where they’d make love and more children.

Clark wanted that with Bruce, but he also wanted that with Lois. He chose Lois. And so, Bruce chose to become a paramour. He’d rather be that than nothing. Sometimes, it was he who led Clark to his bed; it was he who gave the first kiss. And most of the time, it was Clark who came to his bed. He loved it when Clark when did that.

Lois probably knew of their transgressions of Clark’s vows. He bit her. He married her. Yet he still found warmth in someone else’s bed. Bruce's bed.

Clark bit him, too. He’d always wanted to be bitten by him. But not like this. This is everything he’d ever hoped, wanted, and dreamed of, but he was also a prisoner. An imprisoned mate, expected to birth the children Clark wanted to love and nurture, expected to spread his legs and take it whenever his Alpha showed the slightest interest in intimacy.

The day goes by and Bruce lays Lara down to sleep. She’s a perfect, as always.

Clark comes back to his cell, wraps his arms around him, and apologizes for this behavior that morning. Bruce knows why he melts into the embrace and easily lets himself be taken. What’s left of his lingering heat is triggered, and before he knows it, he’s full of Clark’s cock. _This is my mate_ , he thinks deliriously, feeling Clark press into the deepest parts of him, making him ache for more and wish that Clark would stay there, and love him.

So he bites him.

This is his alpha, his mate, and he loves him. Clark is _his_.

He wakes up in the middle of the night and sees Clark’s peaceful sleeping face. Clark rarely gives him a relaxed look. All his smiles are for Lara. Remembering Clark’s smiles for Lara makes Bruce smile. He scoots closer to Clark and kisses his cheek. “Love you,” he whispers. He lays his head on top of Clark’s shoulder, and his hand on his chest before going back to sleep.

He feels Clark kiss his forehead. “Love you, too,”

He wanted this. It’s better than nothing.

* * *

 

Damian remembers the day a nurse, who ran all the way from the wing Bruce is kept in, down to the gym he’s using, to tell him Bruce had undergone emergency surgery. He told the nurse he didn’t care. The nurse frowned and left, and Damian left the punching back looking like it had done him wrong. He went to see them hours after he’d been informed.

He trashed his room. He still hasn’t recovered from that. Right now, the only thing in his room is the bed and the dresser. Nothing else. He doesn’t want to treat the tower as home anymore, not after what Superman told him, so his room is devoid of personal things.

He raises his escrima sticks when Wonder Woman enters his room without so much as a knock. She unlatches her shield from her back, and throws it at the wall adjacent to Damian’s bed.

“What _the fuck_ are you doing?” he demands her, watching her as she retrieves her shield from the dented wall.

“Destroying the bugs,” she says. True enough, there’s a device behind the panel, broken and sparking as the electricity has nowhere to go. She latches the shield on her back, turns around, and sees Damian in an offensive position. “Stand down,”

“After that show? You must be out of your mind,” says Damian. “Good thing there aren’t any cameras in here,”

“Yes, good thing,” says Diana. “Stand down. Do as I say. Attack me and I’ll kill you where you stand without second thought. Like you said, there aren’t any cameras,”

Damian doesn’t stand down, and Diana doesn’t draw her sword. Not yet. “What do you want?”

Diana raises a brow. This child honestly thinks he can take her on. “If you want to know, standing down means you’ll agree to do as I say,”

Damian lowers his weapons, and puts them away. He doesn’t trust her, “What. Do you want.”

“I want you to help me abduct the child,”


	14. The Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to BatShitCrazy and therapyfortravesty (i love you bes hahaha) for all the help!!

When Bruce wakes up in the morning, it’s to Clark’s kisses to his neck and shoulder. Lara is already giggling and crawling all over them on the bed. The good wakeup is Clark’s way of making sure Bruce doesn’t know what’s about to happen at Stryker’s Island in a few hours.

Bruce runs a finger over Clark’s left shoulder. There’s no bite mark.

“I appreciate the sentiment, though,” says Clark, smiling a bit. “I will always be yours, Bruce, bite or no bite,” he gives Bruce a kiss and that makes Lara clap her hands and giggle. Clark chuckles and gathers Lara into his arms and blows a raspberry on her belly.

Lara’s joyous giggles fill the room. “Papa!” she squeals. “Papa!”

Clark loves hearing her call for him. He can listen to her talk gibberish all day. Everything about her is magical. All he wants to do is take her and Bruce to where they can live in peace. Where they can teach her how to count, talk, and mold her every day. Where he can take her outside and play on the grass and under the sun. Where he can take Bruce on long walks and picnics in the afternoon, and cuddle under the night sky.

When he sees his baby girl so full of life, he takes a moment to look at Bruce and in those moments, he realizes again and again that they made this beautiful child, and that he’s irrevocably in love with him, probably more so than he was ever with Lois and Diana. It makes him regret not choosing Bruce first, but that would that mean he’d end up like Lois?

He’d always known he loved and wanted Bruce more than Lois, but he also knew why he chose her instead. He chose her because it meant he would get to keep Bruce, too. It meant he could get his cake and eat it too. Besides, Lois never caught him. She would never had thought he’d sleep with Clark with the amount of work they used to do together. However, Clark had suspicions that she knew or had an idea about his sins but never brought it up. And even if she knew, she didn’t do anything about it.

At that time, Bruce had never told him he loved him, even though Clark had told him a dozen times over. Bruce never said it back. So maybe, Clark thinks, he chose Lois because he wanted to know just how much Bruce wanted him back. He married and bit Lois so Bruce would come after him. To stab him with a knife and twist it to force him to admit what he wouldn’t. That had been successful since Bruce continued to sleep with him despite the engagement, despite his role as best man, and despite the ceremony. Bruce only seemed to want him more after marrying Lois. Because what's more exciting than sleeping with a married man with a pregnant wife, right?

But that all went down the drain. Lois died with his hands, and Bruce turned on him. That doesn’t matter now, because he has him back and Clark has everything he’s ever wanted. Except maybe a nice sprawling property full of trees and a field to cultivate.

“Mama, kiss!” she does a kissing sound with her lips to her palm and points to Bruce, all while looking at Clark. “Mama, kiss!”

Clark laughs. She’s telling him to kiss Bruce. “Let’s have some breakfast,” he leans over to give Bruce the kiss Lara asked him to give, and another just because he wants to, before getting up with Lara.  

The sight of the kiss makes Lara giggle and squeal louder. Clark rejoices in the sounds of her happiness, blowing raspberries on her neck and kissing her plump cheeks. It’s at that moment he makes a vow to never let her cry. She must always be happy, safe, and loved. She will always be loved.

“My baby girl is getting so big!” Clark peppers her with more kisses.  She’s beautiful. She turns to Bruce and sees he too is beautiful, gorgeous, and as handsome as he’s always been. He pulls Bruce closer to him and kisses his temple. He’d do anything and everything for them. Clark’s heart soars when Bruce smiles back at him.

Bruce follows him and they sit at the table, already full of food. The nurses must have set them out while they were asleep. Clark draws it out as long as he can. He’ll need his fill of his mate and child before he attends to his duties. He draws out a chair for Bruce, and places Lara on her high chair and they start their breakfast.

They let Lara eat her eggs from her tray, while he and Bruce had their breakfast of scrambled eggs, ham, and toast. Breakfast was calm, quiet, and it’s always the mealtimes when Clark gets to take care of Lara now that’s she’s grown bigger. Bruce lets him do as much as he can when he’s present, and only does as he asks if he needs it.

After breakfast, Lara has a fantastic time playing with the rubber ducks in the tub while Clark bathed her. When she’s done, the nurse takes her to be dressed while Clark invites Bruce into the bathroom.

“The shower is big enough for the both of us,” says Clark as he undresses.

They’ve shared a shower before. In many places. In his own shower in the manor, in the Batcave, his penthouse, Clark’s apartment before Lois, the Metrotower, and the Watchtower back when it didn’t serve as an impenetrable castle in space. This is the first time Clark invites him to a shower in his cell.

Bruce looks through the glass walls and sees his favorite nurse putting Lara into fresh clothes. “He can see us—Lara will see us,”

Clark takes the hem of Bruce’s scrubs and pulls the top off of him. “They’ve seen us before,” he tells him. “But they won’t. the steam will hide our indecency. He’ll make sure Lara’s kept distracted,” 

Their clothes are on the floor moments later, and warm water rains on them as soon as Clark locks the glass door. They glide their soapy hands on each other’s skin. Bruce avoids any of Clark’s sensitive areas, while Clark shamelessly lathers the soap on both their crotches and Bruce’s chest. Their hair and bodies are thoroughly washed, the water pressure drops and they’re left with slowly streaming water from above, which gradually comes to a stop.

Bruce gasps, leans onto the tile wall, and closes his eyes when he feels Clark’s fingers start to massage him his folds to encourage him to slick himself up. He grunts when he feels the fingers push in, bites his lip, clenches around the curling digits. Bruce is grinding himself on those fingers moments later. He whines when Clark pulls them out.

“No,”

Clark presses his fingers, coated with Bruce’s slick, flat against Bruce’s folds and applies some pressure to massage him. He shushes Bruce gently. “You’ll get it, Bruce,”

His mate groans, and Clark loves the sound of it. He sounds hungry and desperate. Clark takes his cock and teases the hole. He takes one cheek and pushes it away to take a good look at Bruce’s cunt, rubbing the tip all over it as it drips slick onto the tiled floor. He smirks triumphantly at the sight.

Clark’s seen all of what Bruce can give before, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of it. He doesn’t make Bruce wait much longer. He pushes inside into the warm wetness, and Bruce sounds relieved to finally have it inside him.

“Please, please,” Bruce breathes, eagerly moving to fuck himself on Clark.

Bruce’s impatience pleases Clark. Clark keeps Bruce upright by guiding him closer to the wall in front of him to keep him from slipping. He pulls Bruce closer to him, his chest touching Bruce’s back, and grazes his teeth on the still fresh bite, which makes Bruce shiver.

“Knot, knot, knot me please, alpha,” Bruce begs as he wraps his hand around his own cock. Clark’s cock feels so good fucking him wide open. “I’m gonna come,”

The plea draws a growl from Clark. He’ll be late if he knots Bruce, but what the hell, right? It’s not like his knot wasn’t already fully swollen. He wants Bruce to come on his knot. “If you want it that badly,” he pounds into Bruce, chasing his climax. He forces the knot in as he comes.

Bruce thinks he can’t take it in with how painful it’s being, but he’s been knotted before, so it must have fit. After a few moments, it slips in, and Bruce comes, grunting as the orgasm comes in waves, making him tremble, clench around Clark, and his cock release semen.

Clark continues to grind himself into his mate as Bruce goes through wave after wave. “We’ll be tied for a while,”

Bruce hums, content with how good the morning played out.

When the knot deflates, they take another quick wash, and return to Lara.

Clark gets dressed into a fresh pair of jeans and plaid top, then says bids goodbye to his mate and child. He kisses them both, and tells them he’d be back early, maybe before supper if everything goes well.

Bruce kisses back and bids him goodbye. “Love you,” he says before Clark reaches the door.

“Love you, too,” Clark replies with a small smile before leaving the cell.

* * *

 

It all goes according to plan. Cyborg infiltrates the Watchtower, takes command of the teleporters, and beams the duplicate Oliver and Bruce to safety. Until Slade decides to blow up the Watchtower.

As soon Clark sees them disappear after jumping off the cliff at Stryker’s Island, he realizes that someone’s infiltrated the Watchtower. And all Clark can think about while rushing towards it at his top speed was his family. Not the destruction of the perfect world he’d created, or his defeat should they overpower him. His family. His mate and child caught in the mess they shouldn’t be in. He had been wrong thinking they’ll be safe on the Watchtower.

He’s almost there when he sees the core reactor in flames, and the horror creeps into every part of him. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to stay sane if he loses another family. Not again. He rushes toward it, but the tower explodes. It knocks Clark off course, sending him spinning into the vast space. It takes him a while to regain his balance, and when he does, he sees what’s left of the Watchtower.

He screams his lungs out even though no sound actually comes out.

“Superman!” he hears Lex from Earth. “Your time is over!”

In his rage, he zooms back to Metropolis, and crash lands right next to Lex, creating a crater from where he was standing. The cloud of dark smoke made up of ash and dust clears, and Clark stands right over Lex’s armored body. “I trusted you!” Clark grits through his teeth. He can feel the rage surging through him. “You betrayed me!”

“Who…betrayed…whom?” Lex manages to say through his shallow breathing.

He punches through the armor and removes Lex from it. “I gave you peace!” he seethes. “YOU KILLED MY MATE AND DAUGHTER!”

“Your peace…” Lex wheezed. “Your peace is a joke,”

Clark snaps. He grabs Lex’s neck and strangles him to death. When Lex stops breathing, Clark drops him. He doesn’t feel anything other than anger. But then he hears every single person in Metropolis in his head, expressing their disgust and disbelief that he murdered Lex Luthor on live television.

“HE KILLED MY FAMILY!” he yells back at them before flying out of the city with a sonic boom behind him.

* * *

 

At the Fortress, the members of the Regime are figuring out how to suppress and contain the insurrection the duplicates are inciting. Clark thinks the people of earth are ungrateful for revolting against him and his Regime after he gave them peace and kept them safe. He decides to give the people chaos if they want chaos, and tells his followers he’ll make an example of Metropolis and Gotham by levelling them, then invade the dimensions the duplicates come from. Billy expresses his disagreement, saying what he wants to do is going too far.

“My mate and child were killed because of them!” Clark roars.

“There has to be limits! Even on us!” Billy insists. “Especially on us! We can’t do this!”

“That’s enough!” hisses Clark.

“Have you gone nuts?” he says, “Lois would never want—”

Clark grabs him by the neck, freezes his mouth to keep him from speaking, then lobotomizes him with his heat vision. The heat burns through Billy’s skull, and Clark drops the body. He turns to the rest of his Regime. “Anyone else?” when no one answers, he barks orders on how to contain the rebellion. He orders Hal and Barry to ready Doomsday, to which they nod to.

When everybody leaves to execute their orders, Grundy comes in to collect Billy’s body, and Diana pulls Clark to a room nearby to speak with him in private.

“Kal,” she says after a moment, when she’s sure that the rest of them can’t overhear their conversation.

“Diana,” says Kal as he slumps down on the nearest sofa.

Diana’s never heard Kal speak so brokenly, not since Lois. “Kal, they’re safe,”

Kal looks at her. “What?”

From the computer near her, Diana pulls up the feed from the Metrotower in Metropolis. A live video is shown on the large screen. Bruce and Lara are in a room—a cell, much like the one on the Watchtower. They’re resting, and a nurse is nearby handing them bottles of water.

He gets to his feet and rushes towards the screen and stares at it. He traces Bruce’s form with a shaking hand. “They’re safe?” he turns to Diana once more.

“They’re held at basement level 52 of the Metropolis Metrotower,” she tells him. “Nobody was on the Tower when it exploded. Everybody was safely evacuated. Your mate and child, together with their medics, were given priority and were first to leave. The last were engineers who took the escape pods headed for Metrotowers in different locations around the globe,”

“They’re safe,” Clark says again as if he’s trying to convince himself that this is real. He stares at the monitor, feed showing him that they’re not shaken or hurt. Nurses lay out a play mat for Lara, to which she happily crawls onto. Toys are spread out for her by another nurse and she immediately gets to them.

He doesn’t say anything more to Diana before leaving the Fortress at his top speed, headed to his mate and child. Words and thoughts can’t express how relieved and thankful he is that they are safe. Nobody catches or notices him rush into the building. He doesn’t want to bother using the elevator. He wants to go down the elevator shaft and exit at the 52nd level, but he can’t since he has to go through several identification processes before he can access the basement levels. Clark calms himself down, lets the lines his eye with retinal scanner, lets his hand print be scanned, and his voice recognized before he’s allowed to board the elevator.

“Basement level 52,” he tells the AI, which repeats the command back to him before it moves to take him to his desired floor.

He stands in the elevator with clenched fists, somehow wishing the elevator would go faster. A few painfully long moments later, a bell sounds and the doors open. Clark hurries through them and lets his hearing take his feet where he has to go. After going through several halls that seemed to close in on him, he finds the holding cell and bursts through the doors.

“Bruce!”

“Clark?”

“Papa!” Lara shrieks and runs toward him, leaving her toys scattered on the playmat on the floor.

Clark catches her, brings her to the bed where Bruce was watching her from, and pulls them both into his arms, unable to help the tears as he presses kissing to their hair, and to Bruce’s lips. “I thought I lost you,”

Bruce returns the embrace and the kiss, while Lara giggles in delight at the sight of her father.

“What happened?” Bruce asks much later when Clark is much calmer.

Clark doesn’t want to worry them so he doesn’t tell them the whole truth. “The Watchtower’s reactor malfunctioned,” he says. “That’s why you were brought here,”

Bruce’s eyes widen. “Is everybody okay?”

“They’re okay,” Clark nods. “I just had to see if you were safe. I wasn’t informed of the Watchtower’s status. The reactor’s condition was declining way too fast,”

“Has nobody been on duty at core?” Bruce frowns. He knows how the Watchtower is run still. He was the one who helped build it.

“I’m not sure, Bruce,” Clark shakes his head. “But for now, the important thing is everybody’s safe. You and Lara are safe,”

For a while, Clark stays with them. He has a cup of coffee with Bruce, then plays with Lara on the floor before leaving to return to the mess up on the surface. He lifts Lara off the floor and wraps his arm around Bruce, holding them both close to him. “I love you,” he says as he gives Bruce another kiss. “When I return, we’ll relocate you to somewhere safer and better, for all of us,”  

“Where?” Bruce bravely asks.

“I’ll think of something,” Clark answers. He wants it to be in Kansas. He wants to live with his family in the house he grew up in. “I’ll be back tonight, okay?”

Bruce nods. “Okay,”

Clark leans in to kiss him one more time. “I love you,”

“I love you, too,” Bruce replies. “Be careful,”

“I will,”

* * *

 

When Kal leaves to ready the mobilization of the military, Diana leaves her general in Themyscira to manager hers. Damian moves to execute her orders half an hour after Superman leaves the tower, just to make sure. He slips into the Metrotower’s security hub easily. Since there are no cameras and recording bugs inside the hub, he rolls a knockout gas bomb into the room, and the three personnel on duty fall unconscious. He and Diana have about half an hour to do what they need to do before they wake up.

He works fast on console. He plugs a thumb drive that runs a program that feeds the last idle ten seconds on loop to the cameras, and a virus that disables all of the recording bugs all over the building. He deletes all the recordings that the building has stored, including the one on the cloud and the several RAID backups.

For a moment, Damian stares at the computer, wondering what else he can do. He pulls up all of Bruce’s hospital records and all of the data gathered about him on the Watchtower the last few years, and deletes them. He deletes them off the backups, the cloud, and RAIDs. He sends commands to all of the Regime’s computers to delete any info about Bruce in the last two years. All that information included Lara.

When he’s done, he calls Diana on a different earpiece to keep their calls from getting intercepted, telling her recording security devices are disabled.

He sees her stride into the building, and he follows her to the elevator leading to the basement levels. She watches her go through the security measures. He doesn’t have access to the basement levels, so she has to wait for her.

Diana tells the AI to take her to the 52nd level. The speed of the elevator almost makes Damian a little lightheaded, but he ignores it. The elevator stops and the doors open. Diana leads her through the halls. There aren’t any people down here except for the nurses. Damian throws another knockout gas bomb into the nurses’ room. When the gas dissipates, they walk past the unconscious nurses and enter Bruce’s cell.

Diana enters first, which gives Bruce the idea that she’s only here to visit. However, he immediately becomes suspicious because Diana is wearing her full Amazonian regalia, and he’s never seen her out of her long gowns. Until today.

“Diana?” he says carefully as he stands up from the floor on Lara’s playmat.

Diana easily subdues Bruce, whose skills have deteriorated from lack of use and exercise, by restraining him with the lasso. The lasso doesn’t glow but Bruce feels like it’s a snake wrapping around him. The lasso’s magical qualities allowed it to lengthen if needed, so the lasso is long enough to gag Bruce, and restrain his entire body as he struggles and tries to scream for help. He falls to the floor in a heap.

“Grab the child,” she says.

Bruce’s eyes widen when he sees Damian, also in uniform, enter the room. He strains and struggles to get out of the lasso, but it won’t budge. All he can do is watch Damian take Lara, who’s transfixed with Damian. She touches Damian’s cheeks, studying him carefully. He begs Diana not to hurt her, his words muffled by the lasso. Damian looks at him, then leaves with her. He tries to get out of the binding harder, the tendons in his neck raise, and his skin is flushed red from the struggling, screaming for Damian to bring her back.

Diana kneels next him and grabs his face to make him look at her. She almost pities the genuine terror and desperation in his face. She takes the opportunity to twist the knife in him. “The whore in you thought the rapist in him was making love to you,” her eyes scrutinize him from head to toe. “Maybe you two do belong together. A whore and a rapist, a mistress and a cheater,” 

She does a blood choke on him to knock him out. The lasso untangles itself from Bruce’s unconscious body and Diana attaches the lasso to her hip before she leaves. She locks the cell and the nurses room to keep them from escaping.

* * *

 

Damian knows where he should take her, that’s why he changes into civilian clothing before taking her there to avoid being caught. He hotwires a car, one with dark tint so that they can’t be seen from the outside, and secures her in the back seat with a seatbelt before getting in and flooring it. She stares at him like he’s someone she knows.

“Mama?” she asks.

“Not here,” Damian grunts as he continues to drive.

“Papa?”

“Not here either, kid,”

Damian abandons the car two miles away, steals a bicycle to ride for about one and half mile, then abandons the bike half a mile off, and jogs the rest of the way. Lara seems to have enjoyed the bicycle ride and the walk, since she keeps on pointing at things, asking Damian what they were, and Damian would answer every other question. What kind of two-year-old kid hasn’t seen grass yet? Right, one raised in a space station, miles above earth, by an oppressive dictator and his whore mate.

A hundred meters or so left to the location he’d been given, Damian realizes, as Lara fell asleep on his shoulder, that this toddler is his little sister. That maybe he likes her just a little bit because she’s painfully cute, and did nothing wrong. She didn’t ask to be born. It’s not her fault she has psychotic parents.

He shakes his head hoping the thought will leave him. He enters the building. It seems abandoned, but when he gets a proper look, the walls are decent and there’s a room at the end of the hallway. The open door is illuminating the dark hallway.

Lara wakes up when he enters the building, startled by the creaking metal doors. She looks around quietly. Damian thought children at this age would be scared at everything, but then he remembers Lara isn’t a normal little girl. She didn’t have her own bedroom, where she could have been scared of the dark or the monsters under her bed.

Damian enters the room and he sees Diana speaking with the other dimension’s Batman, and their Superman next to him. The sight makes him stop at the door. He doesn’t know which startles him more, the sight of his father’s face bruised and battered, in uniform, standing next to Superman, or Superman, who looks nothing like their own. Who looks young, carefree, and not burdened with so much anger and hate.

“Mama!” Lara says happily. “Papa!” she looks at Damian and pulls on his shirt, demanding to be brought over to them.

He approaches the duplicate Batman, and hands over the little girl, who without any reservation, snuggles into his neck.

“She’s beautiful,” says Clark in awe as she takes her when she reaches for him. “Why? Why give her to us?”

Diana takes a moment to think about why. She can’t tell them she did it out of spite. Out of anger, revenge, jealousy, out of scorn. But then Lara looks at her like she’s grateful to be here, even though they’d just taken her from her real parents. “We wanted to give her a chance to live. She doesn’t have a future here. With you, she can have a shot at a normal life, as normal as half-Kryptonian life can be,”

Superman turns to Lara once more, studying her features. “Is the mother—”

“You’re better off not knowing, Superman,” Diana cuts him off. “We’ll give you a few minutes to get acquainted with her, but you need to take her out of here _now_ ,” says Diana. “Before he finds out,” she gives them space and drags Damian away from them a few feet. 

They stand there quietly as the two duplicates coo over the child. Diana notices how Damian looks both wistful and angry at them. She can’t blame him. Damian had a rough childhood and Bruce had been terrible to him.

“I don’t need your pity,” Damian says without looking at her, because he’s gotten that look before. From the nurses who took care of Lara and Bruce. “He’s never been a father to me, and giving her away is a good idea. Bruce would have fucked up with her too,”

Diana doesn’t answer immediately. “He was a good father to Dick,” 

Damian gives her a bad look. “I get it. I’m the piece of shit and Grayson was the golden boy. Can we go?” he said petulantly.

The duplicate Batman nods at Diana, and she approaches him. “She’ll be safe with us,”

Diana turns to Superman. “You will keep this to yourself. If you mention it to him, he’ll kill you,”

Superman nods. “I understand,”

Damian doesn’t know what gets into him, but the words just come tumbling out of his mouth. “How is your Damian?”

“Good,” answers his father’s bruised duplicate. “In school. He might not like the idea of a little sister at first, I suppose,”

For a few seconds there’s silence, then Damian says, “It was an accident,” he doesn’t know if he wants to cry or lash out. “It was an accident,” he says again, and this time, he can’t suppress how broken he sounds.

“I know,” Bruce says softly. Bruce doesn’t know, but he can’t bear to see the image of his son so distraught. He lifts Damian’s chin to get a good look at him, then pulls him in for a hug. “I know,” 

Damian falls into the embrace and hugs him back tightly. “No, you don’t,” he sobs. “You don’t know, but I’m so sorry, Father. I am so sorry,” he takes in the scent of him, much like his own father.

It reminded him of the days when this world’s Bruce used to make an effort on him when he first arrived. Bruce might not have birthed him, but at times Damian felt like he did, better than Talia. Those are the few moments he clung onto. That’s why it hurt so much. He knew what it was like to be loved and cared for, even just a little bit. Talia hadn’t really shown any interest in showing him affection. To her, he was a soldier. A beta raised as an alpha. There were so many ways that could go wrong.

And maybe that is why he couldn’t help but compare himself to Dick. They were both betas; they were equals. But he’d been tossed aside like nothing, while Dick, even in death, was Bruce’s everything.

At least now, he knows that their Damian is loved. That’s a nice thought to hold on to.

“I know, Damian. And I forgive you. Remember, I will always love you, Damian,” Bruce lets go. He doesn’t know why Damian deserved to be treated like this, but he understands a child should never have gone through what he has. “Always,”

Damian nods, then watches Bruce take Lara from Superman, who gives Bruce a loving kiss goodbye, and walk through the portal back to their dimension.  

* * *

 

When Superman, leader of the One Earth Government, is brought down by his duplicate, Damian lets himself get arrested, and Diana turns herself into her people, escorted by her duplicate. Everybody is tried for their crimes and imprisoned. Superman demands to see his mate and child, but they won’t let him.

Bruce is rescued from his cell in the Watchtower. It spreads that he’d been Superman’s prisoner. Since it’s well known that he was forced into hiding after the rise of the Regime, he is promised and offered many things. He is offered witness protection, the return of all of his assets, and a quiet life left alone, away from the spotlight—if he agrees to testifying against Superman. He doesn’t agree. He’s charged with obstruction of justice and thus he is an accomplice to all of Superman’s crimes against humanity.

Superman is put into a cell specifically made to render him powerless. Every day he demands to see his mate and child. And both of them demand to see their daughter, a two-year-old little girl named Lara Kal-El. Bruce says Wonder Woman took her from him.

Damian hears from the guards about how Superman broke Batman during his imprisonment so badly they were both suffering the same delusion, saying Wonder Woman took the child. Damian wonders why Bruce hasn’t told anybody he took her too.

The guards laugh, saying they’re looking for a girl named Lara.

There is no record of her anywhere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave comments. :) Comments make me happy :)


	15. 20 weeks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to BatShitCrazy for the beta and for therapyfortravesty for all her enabling and suggestions!

It doesn’t take long for the workers to finish making the cell right next to him, not with the dozens and dozens of people rushing to finish it. He watches them day and night, while he’s pacing, reading, and preparing to go to bed. They work in shifts; different men working in the day and in the night. They’re not allowed to acknowledge his presence, and the only fun he has is threateningly glare at one who tries to.

Separating the two cells is a thick, bulletproof, shatterproof glass, a way for him to see whoever they’re imprisoning with him. Clark can’t break through it with the red solar light son, even if he wanted to. The other cell doesn’t have red solar lights, which means it’s intended for a human prisoner.

He misses his daughter. His perfect little girl with the brightest blue eyes and her sharp mind, just like Bruce’s. But the world won’t believe that she’s real.

He’d heard from rumors that Bruce said Diana took her. That made him see nothing but red. He screamed until his throat was raw, yelling, screaming at the lawyer to do something to give Bruce their daughter back. If he had been able to free himself from the cell, he would’ve destroyed earth all over again. They didn’t know where she was. But Clark has a hunch. If they can’t find her on this earth, she’s probably on those duplicates’ earth.

“You’ll never guess who your neighbor will be,” his guard mocks him, smirking from behind the glass, 20 feet away from him. “They decided it’d be nice for you two to be together for just a little while,”

Alarms blare, and red lights start to flash, signaling the entry of a new inmate. The thick metal doors slide open, and another two guards from another holding facility enter his detention complex with the inmate. Clark’s brows meet in confusion. He still has some of his super hearing despite the significant decrease in his powers due to the red specialized lamps in his cell. He can tell there are five new heart beats, six in total, but there are only four people.

Two guards roll in an upright gurney. He assumes the prisoner is sedated, but despite that he’s still restrained by a straitjacket and the gurney’s belts.  

Clark’s eyes widen.

It’s Bruce. They’re going to put Bruce right next to him.

The guard smirks at him when he realizes who the prisoner is.

“TAKE YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF OF HIM!” Clark pounds on the glass of his cell. Clark’s never felt this angry in his entire life. Not even after Lois’ death.

He doesn’t listen. He presses his hand on Bruce’s distended belly, rubbing circles on it over the straitjacket. “It’s your first time learning about this, huh?” he enjoys provoking Clark, knowing his prisoner is powerless as long as the lights are on.

Now Clark realizes why there are extra heartbeats. Twins. Bruce is pregnant with _twins_.

“They say these two were conceived during his last heat,” says the guard, pressing his nose into Bruce’s mating bite. “Bet you had such a nice time knotting the pretty omega, huh? He’s so deliciously fertile you managed to fuck twins into him. You think we can fuck more into him?” he turns to his fellow guards who lightly laugh at the crude joke.

Clark starts to punch on the glass again. “STOP TOUCHING HIM!” this is the first time Clark has seen Bruce in months, and this isn’t how he wants to be reunited with him. He would rather them just leave Bruce in his cell and celebrate their reunion quietly, even if it means they will be on different sides of the glass wall.

“Don’t you just love the smell of pregnant omega?” he licks the bite. “He smells like sweet milk and honey, and smells like he’s about to go into a false heat, too. I’m going to have fun knotting him,”

“NO!” Clark punches harder. “GET OFF HIM!”

They roll Bruce into the new cell, undo his restraints, and set him down on the bed. Clark can’t do anything but watch as they undress Bruce. It’s payback, the guards say as they assaulted Bruce, for enslaving earth, and it’s only fair that they hurt him right back.

It’s disgusting how much they enjoyed it.

* * *

When Bruce wakes up, he feels like he’s about to throw up. What kind of sedative did they give him? Was it safe for the babies?

The room, which is white and bright, spins around him. It takes a few tries for him to get up. When he’s aware enough to look at his surroundings and himself, he realizes he’s not wearing the orange jumpsuit he used to wear at Belle Reve, but a hospital gown. He looks to his left and sees fresh clothes, scrubs, much like the ones he used to wear on the Watchtower, at the end of the bed.

“Bruce!”

Bruce looks to the direction of the voice. One side of the cell is made of glass, and Clark is on the other side in his own cell. “Clark!” he tries to stand up, but falls to his knees. He groans and winces. His entire hip region feels painful, and he feels a thick fluid flow down to his thighs. He lifts the gown and sees that the wetness he feels is seminal fluid.

“Clark,” he says in horror. “Clark!”

“I’m so sorry, Bruce,” Clark says weakly, sitting on the floor, on the side of his cell closest to the glass wall between them. “I couldn’t do anything,”

Raped. He’d been raped in his sleep.

* * *

Clark and Bruce have a quiet week. It pains Clark not to be able to touch him, kiss him, or comfort him about what had happened, or exact revenge for him. Bruce says he’s seen a doctor only once at Belle Reve, just before he was moved here. He’s had one sonogram, and he wasn’t allowed to get a photo of them. They talk about the babies, mostly, about how Bruce feels like his stomach is about to drop even though he’s only halfway there, how they’re fraternal, how Bruce doesn’t know their sexes yet.

“They want them to work for the government,” Bruce says blankly one day. The scrub top he’s wearing is scrunched up to the top of his belly, letting Clark see the stretched skin as he runs his fingers over them.  

“Like hell they will!” Clark growls.

Clark knows the moment Bruce gives birth, they’ll take the children and they’ll be raised by people like Waller, like Eiling, and like Hamilton, those who seek to make weapons out of metahuman children.

Alarms blare and Bruce’s cell opens. The guards from a week ago enter, together with several others.

“Nice belly you got there,” one says.

“It just proves how much he loves cock,” says another.

“Doesn’t matter if it’s Superman’s or not, does it?”

This time, Bruce thinks he can take them. He hopes and wishes he can, but his belly now is heavier than it had been with Lara. He doesn’t know if fighting is a good idea. If he fights, he might lose the babies, but just taking it is not something he wants, however it will ensure the children’s safety.

He’s able to fight them off as well as he can under the circumstances, but he ends up gagged and held down by them.

“I love it when they struggle,” says the same guard who first assaulted Bruce. “Makes it a lot sweeter,”

Bruce can hear Clark screaming in the background. He kicks the guard above him, but another holds his leg down. He screams through the gag when he feels one of them push in.

“Oh yeah,” the guard breathes. “Look at me, babe,” he says, grabbing Bruce’s face. “Look at the face of humanity fucking you like the way your mate fucked with us,”

There’s the sound of glass shattering, metal bending, and alarms sounding louder than they’d ever been. There’s a crash, and suddenly all of them are off of him, flying in all directions. Bruce scrambles away from all the broken glass and removes the gag. There’s blood everywhere. There’s a decapitated head near Bruce’s bed, a body torn in half by the toilet, and mangled limbs scattered around, as if a bomb had gone off on them.

Bruce looks at Clark, who’s drenched in blood, and to the walls of the cell, which are destroyed way beyond repair. Clark approaches Bruce and lifts him off the floor. “Let’s get you out of here,”

“Clark,” Bruce breathes, cupping Clark’s face to press their foreheads together. “Take back our daughter. Kill them all,”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes. This is it. No, there won't be a sequel.
> 
> Please leave comments! Comments are good. ☻ ♥


	16. UPDATE

I know I said there won't be a sequel, but I did say that if and when I get my hands on Injustice 2 (shoutout to mitzvamelting, i love you dear), I might be able to write a sequel. So I wrote a sequel. Please read it. It's alright if you don't want to. It's called: 

 

#  [MINE TO CONQUER](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15841755/chapters/36892245)

 

just click on the title to read it, or click below in the series area of the page. Thank you and I hope you enjoy! 

 

Oh, and read the tags please. Might add to that as the story goes along.


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